The INTERZONE Newsletter // 9 September 2023

A new IZ Digital story by Kasimma, the IZ 295 ebook and extras, and some wonderful books available at Scarlet Ferret, the DRM-free ebook shop

Kasimma’s Wifeoma

New today in IZ Digital, a story by Kasimma with art by Dante Luiz: ‘There is Something to be Said About Wifeoma’.

Kasimma is from Igboland (obodo ndị dike). She’s the author of All Shades of Iberibe, the 2022 Nikky Finney Fellow at the University of Kentucky and the Humanities Graduate Fellow at the University of Utah, and her short stories, essays, poems, and scripts appear in Solarpunk, LitHub, New Orleans Review, Magonprism, The Saltbush Review, Afreecan Read, Native Skin, Meet Cute, and many other online journals and print anthologies. Kasimma is an alumnus of Chimamanda Adichie’s creative writing workshop, Wole Soyinka Foundation writers’ residency, and other residencies across four continents.

Here is the opening of ‘There is Something to be Said About Wifeoma’:

There is something to be said about the year 2020. It was the year I lost my best uncle, best parent’s affection, best friend, my mind. For three days, I stayed locked up in my room, awaiting the return of the search party that went to retrieve my mind from an ant colony of confusion. Water became food. I obeyed sleep, but I sprang up whenever I imagined Osa had called me. Tears and spittle formed white whiskers on my cheeks. My fingers were stuffed with flesh exhumed from scratching the existence out of the scar on my right cheek.

You can read the rest for free at IZ Digital.

Interzone subscribers and IZ Digital supporters can get an EPUB edition (email subscriptions@interzone.press if you’re not sure how to do that) of that story, and other new stories published in IZ Digital.

And you can find more of Kasimma’s fiction in her excellent collection All Shades of Iberibe, and also at her website.

EPUBs Galore

Print Interzone subscribers have started receiving their copies of IZ 295. I have also emailed out the promotional code and link for the EPUB edition of the issue (all print subscribers get the ebook edition of Interzone for free) that is distributed by Scarlet Ferret (more on them in the section below). Scarlet Ferret currently stock single ebook issues of Interzone, with extras, but ebook subscriptions are on the way. Interzone is also available from Weightless Books.

Bundled with the ebook edition of Interzone #295 are two ebook exclusives: ‘Dog Lady’ (a refugee from a far, far star shows human beings what it looks like to behave decently…) by Edward R. Morris and ‘The Window in the Forest’ (a man walks away from his life and finds solitude in an abandoned cabin in the woods, but he may not be entirely alone…) by Seán Padraic Birnie, with art by Dante Luiz.

The Scarlet Ferret ebook of IZ 295 also comes with EPUB editions of 20 stories published in IZ Digital, and an invite to the IZ Digital Discord where you talk with other readers of IZ about fiction, films, and whatever else is on your mind.

If you are a print subscriber and you haven’t yet received an email with that promotional code, and you would like the EPUB edition, please email subscriptions@interzone.press and let me know – I’ll send it to you.

Read on for more about Scarlet Ferret and their books…

Smarter Than the Average Bookseller

Scarlet Ferret is:

a curated online bookshop, selling independent Special Edition ebooks with extras, in DRM-free formats for all your favourite reading devices, including Kindle.

It is a very cool project that sells many brilliant books. Here are a few of the titles they stock:

• Joyce Chng’s series of Qing China period magical fantasies: Xiao Xiao & The Dragon’s Pearl, Ming Zhu & The Pearl That Shines, and Pearl of the Palace…
• Tenea D. Johnson’s R/evolution/Evolution, a cyberpunk/afrofuturist duology set in a near-future US fracturing along lines of class and race…
• Chris Farnell’s novellas about the Fermi, the Earth’s first and last FTL spaceship – the last, because its Alcubierre drive, which nobody knows how to turn off, vaporises entire star systems every time it jumps…
• B.P. Gregory’s Flora and Jim, the story of a father and daughter struggling to survive in a frozen, post-apocalyptic world where animals are ascendant…
• Andrew Skinner’s Origin Complex, a novel about Crash, an operative trained to investigate the secrets of the alien ruins that scatter her universe…

The mastermind behind Scarlet Ferret is Kevin Beynon. Kevin is doing a huge amount to support authors (and magazines!) from all over the world and I am very happy Interzone is sold there.

Do take a look, and if you can, buy a new book, or two; or subscribe to Ferret Post, their newsletter, to get updates of future releases.

(Kevin Beynon has also created the very useful Libreture, an ebook cloud library where you can store all your DRM-free ebooks, digital comics, and magazines! So many good ideas!)

That’s it for today. Until the next time!

Warmly,

Gareth Jelley, Editor & Publisher

Interzone & IZ Digital

‘Do you know how a person’s voice goes out his mouth and travels into someone’s ear sixty or a hundred miles away? Or how a turbo on the Tennessee can make the copper thread inside a light bulb burn so hot it shines? I’ll be damned if I know. You can fit what I know about what makes things work and how the world was made into a peanut.’

— Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen

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