Anna Tambour and Others

Anna Tambour and Others

Summer

December 2011

another

Magnificent Insignificant

Have you tried my blog?

Like oysters to some,

and like oysters to others.

(a sample: Archaeologists, Palaeographers, and Punctuationists fight over cryptic dohicky)

"I hate

quotations. "

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The first rule of aggressive bag-pipe playing is to get out of the way of the things you play it at."

- "Undine Love" by Kathleen Jennings,

Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine

There's one more thing you should know about the art disease. It's highly contagious.

- "The Art Disease" by Dennis Danvers, Electric Velocipede

The domestic patterning of the activity of folding clothes is extended in this work to include pairs of gloves as they are hung out to dry, also recalling the absent presence of their former wearers.

- Parramasala events - Art

Hey…uh…do you think I could buy you dinner or something? You can always blow up the world afterwards.
- Bob, in Flash Hole by Ethan Fode

Beit Shemesh's growing ultra-Orthodox population has erected street signs calling for the separation of sexes on the sidewalks, dispatched "modesty patrols" to enforce a chaste female appearance and hurled stones at offenders and outsiders. Walls of the neighborhood are plastered with signs exhorting women to dress modestly in closed-necked, long-sleeved blouses and long skirts.

- Aron Heller, Israeli girl's plight highlights Jewish extremism, Associated Press

Those who are outwardly lawless and wicked often are heard saying, "for God's sake" or "for Christ's sake." It is done in an irreverent, blasphemous way. Those who are more cultured use substitutes: "for Goodness sake" "for Pete's sake" "for the love of Mike" "for crying out loud" etc."

- Minced Oaths: An important message for believers

These books are so dark that no light can escape their gravitational pull.

- Spencer Pate, reviewing David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, Light of Lost Words

A timberyard lies just beyond the dust, welcoming the felled hearts of Borneo on flatbeds of diesel.

– budak, Fuelings, The annotated budak

He has the most distorted ideas about wit and humour.

– Arthur Herman Gilkes, headmaster, in his report to the parents of P.G. Wodehouse

the unpleasant, acrid smell of burned poetry

– P.G. Wodehouse, The Fiery Wooing of Mordred

Could Homo sapiens' sizeist prejudice be holding back progress? Psychologists have been hinting at it for years, but we always assumed they were all crazy feminists driven to studying because they can't bake a decent pie.

- Kate Oliver, Massive particles 'too fat to come out in public', LabLit

The more successful

a children's book is, the more adult readers there are.

– A.C.E. Bauer, It's just a children's book, The Virtuous Medlar Circle

I highly recommend Come Fall.

I slightly mourn the more whimsical names but their time was past.

- Sue Povey, quoted in Bye-bye boojums; Are scientists losing their sense of fun? New Scientist, 20/27 December 2008

I bought a paperback and read it. I set my alarm watch for 6:30. The paperback scared me so badly that I put two guns under my pillow. It was about a guy who bucked the hoodlum boss of Milwaukee and got beaten up every fifteen minutes. I figured that his head and face would be nothing but a piece of bone with a strip of skin hanging from it. But in the next chapter he was gay as a meadow lark. Then I asked myself why I was reading this drivel when I could have been memorizing The Brothers Karamosov.

- Raymond Chandler, find the book

More in The Cellar ØØØ

Anna Tambour stories that can be read online:

Stories & poems in the HMS Beagle: BioMedNet archive

Temptation of the Seven Scientists

The Emperor's Backscratcher

Travels with Robert Louis Stevenson in the Cévennes

The Wages of Food-Play

Klokwerk's Heart

Me-Too

& Try

Bowl of Critters

an occasional snack

Now serving:

The adventures of discovering the ellemehnopee

Skin, Fiction, Mushrooms, & Progress

Out-of-the-box Serving Suggestion

The Mary Quant Jelly Thing & other surprises from the sea

And in

Heliotrope Magazine

A long poem

Succession At Quandong Creek

In memoriam
Asher E. Treat

(1907 - 2004)
"Actually, Asher was an excellent dinner companion. Anybody who wears a loupe around his neck at dinner, and tells you how he finally trained his box turtle Mabel to listen to his commands (after 35 years), or sent small boys out to catch bats, and then explain how mites can only live in the left ear (right ear in the old world) of moths to evade the bats, or who would build a mammoth box kite and fly it half a mile high off Cobble, or who would play his French horn so that you'd hear it across the valley, Anybody like that makes an excellent dinner companion."

- Edward Perkins,

in a letter to A.T.

— A little Treat —

" The lepidopterist who seeks an easy introduction to the Astigmata had best leave his collection and visit the nearest cheese shop. "

Home of

The Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Bulwer-Lytton

a place of compassion in a cruel world

Anna Tambour currently
lives in the Australian bush with
a large family of other species,
including one man.

(Rosie, the beauty in the picture above, died on the 19th of January, 2006. Her tributes are firstly this, and then this.)

Qs and As

Interview by Iain Rowan (as part of his "Writers talk about writing" series), More News from Nowhere, 19 July 2011
Interview by Mark Farrugia, Andromeda Spaceways, #48, Nov 2010
Interview by members of Chronicles Network April 2006
Audio interview by Evo Terra, Dragon Page October 2005
Interview by Keith Brooke April 2005
Ben Peek's 2005 Snapshot of Australian Fiction April '05
Walking Jeff VanderMeer's plank Feb '05

anna_tambour at yahoo.com

Some Seasoned Preserves

Spring

October 2011

"Native peach" Trema tomentosa

showing leaf curl that could be caused by a virus, though "peach" is caused by a delusion

winter

July 2011

An oddly exhibitionistic mantis

Summer

January 2009

Fresh from the ground, a cicada

If we had been made in the image of Cicada, what price gold and rubies?

Books by A.T.

Online stories

- Just released -

10 December 2011

Phantasmagorium #1

edited by Laird Barron

"Cardoons!"

a terrifying tale of

veg and WARNINGs

Read my newest free online published story

"The Oyster and Alice O."

FLURB

a Webzine of Astonishing Tales Issue #12 "Fall–Winter" 2011

edited and illustrated (in paintings and photographs) by Rudy Rucker.

"She writes so far left field that you need binoculars to see her."

- Girlie Jones, Not if You Were the Last Short Story on Earth

"I have particularly enjoyed Monterra's fable, and have read it to my pigs Alice, Ferdinand and Isabella, who also appreciated its humour and scope."
–Tom Jaine

amongst other comings . . .

Cardoons!

in the first issue of the new quarterly, Phantasmagorium, edited by Laird Barron

Marks and Coconuts

in Postscripts from PS Publishing

2011

New e-editions

from infinity plus

"Tambour could be called an infinity plus 'discovery' ... Monterra’s Deliciosa is a delicious collection of often startling and outrageous tales."

– Paul F. Cockburn, Interzone, May-June 2011

This edition includes a

New (Nov 2011)

One story picked from the collection

Infinity Plus Singles #10

Even this infinity plus e-dition includes never-before-seen additives

Anthologies & magazines that include A.T.'s stories

2010

Sprawl

edited by

Alisa Krasnostein

Published by Twelfth Planet Press

"Gnawer of the Moon Seeks Summit of Paradise"

Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine

in #44, the cover story

"The Eye of Nostradamus Summit"

(cover art by Marc McBride)

in #46

"How Galligaskins Sloughed the Scourge"

in #42

"The Arms of Love and Death"

June 2010

"Dreadnought Neptune"

2009

Lovecraft Unbound

edited by

Ellen Datlow

"Sincerely, Petrified"

2008

The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Sixteen Original Works by Speculative Fiction's Finest Voices

edited by

Ellen Datlow

"Gladiolus Exposed"

Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy

edited by

Ekaterina Sedia

Published by Senses Five Press

"The Age of Fish, Post-flowers"

Year's Best Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy, Volume 4

edited by

Bill Congreve & Michelle Marquardt

Published by MirrorDanse Books

"The Jeweller of Second-hand Roe"

Scary Food: A Compendium of Gastronomic Atrocity

edited by

Cat Sparks

Published by Agog! Press

"Tasty Morsels"

& other stories

2007

EŞİK CİNİ 13

Two stories (The tiger and the mice & Sweat, Joy, and Thunderation) and an interview,

translated into Turkish by Nurduran Duman

Eþik Cini means 'Elf of Sills'

The Workers' Paradise

edited by

Russell B. Farr and Nick Evans

"Seahoney"

Subterranean #7

edited by Ellen Datlow

"The Jeweller of Second-hand Roe"

Aurealis Award, Horror Short Story

Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories

edited by John Klima

Order here or ask for it at your bookstore

"Pococurante"

Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing

edited by

Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss

"The Shoe in SHOES' Window"

"The Syncopation Streak"

Polyphony 6

edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake

"The Beginnings, Endings, and Middles Ball"

Read it in Omnidawn's free sampler

ParaSpheres:

Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories

edited by

Rusty Morrison & Ken Keegan

"See Here, See There"

Agog! Ripping Reads

edited by Cat Sparks

"The Slime: A love story"

Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 19

edited by Gavin Grant and Kelly Link

"The Cat Story"

Andromeda Spaceways, #24

edited by Edwina Harvey

"There is No Rice Pudding in the Sea"

Fantasy Magazine, #3

edited by Sean Wallace

in Mythic Delirium

edited by Mike Allen

a poem: "Trapped Words"

Hear it read by Alistair Rennie

A Novel and a Collection by A.T.

A Locus Recommended Reading List Selection

His eyelashes fluttered. 'Oh dearie me. You asked, and I'm telling you how it is. I never lie.'
I shot him a look that would pierce most people of my acquaintance.
He looked blandly back. However, he seemed truthful.

Angela Pendergast, escapee from the Australian bush, grew up with the smell of hot mutton fat in her hair, the thought of her teeth crunching a cold Tim Tam chocolate biscuit -- the height of decadent frivolity.

Now, though her tastes have grown and she knows absolutely what she wants, her life is embarrassingly stuck.

So when the Devil drops into her bedroom in her sharehouse in inner-city Sydney with a contract in hand, she signs.

He's got only a Hell's week to fulfil his side, but in the meantime he must chaperone her -- or is it the other way around?

The SF Site: Featured Review by Rich Horton

"...a wicked, thoroughly unpredictable romp . . . Spotted Lily might just be a particularly inventive comic take on wish-fulfillment, but soon enough it strays far from the beaten path...a dizzying but delightful journey through old myths and modern chaos, turning Faust and Pygmalion on their ear as it cuts its own path toward something like self-knowledge."

- Faren Miller, Locus

"I hate giving away the story, but allow me to say that this novel is not going where you think it is....teaming with genuine wit and humor... excellent writing...One thing I’m sure of is that it should be required reading for all those who go into writing fiction with dreams of great remuneration and fame. If it were, Tambour would already be both wealthy and famous."

- Jeffrey Ford

"One of the things I liked most about this book was that it was so difficult to tell where it was going...the book is so well written that for a lot of the time you don’t actually notice that it has a supernatural element to it."

- Cheryl Morgan, Emerald City

"It's passionate, it's intense, it's profoundly human and humane and honest, and, when it comes down to it, a hell of a read.

I was sitting up late into the night to finish it. It's that good."

- Keith Brooke

"This shocker . . . may well strike some

like a bracing tonic and others like something

a lot less palatable."

PublishersWeekly

Anna Tambour, on the strength of Spotted Lily and her earlier story collection, Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales &, is one of the most delightful, original, and varied new writers on hand.

- Rich Horton

Perhaps you would like to read

Chapter One

Published by Prime Books
Cover art for Spotted Lily:
The Artist by Norman Lindsay (Australian) c.1921,

copyright © Lin Bloomfield
Stomates on scouring rush, electron microscope view, copyright © Dennis Kunkel Microscopy, Inc.
Book Design: Anna Tambour

and another

Locus Recommended Reading List Selection

Monterra's Deliciosa
& Other Tales &

Introduction by Keith Brooke

Temptation, indulgence, exploration and shortcuts. Love and compulsion. An ocean in Kansas, the Magic Lino, the real story behind the one told by Robert Louis Stevenson, a chef dying of ennui, gathering bluebirds, paying with candywrap. And the greatest story ever told -- by Asher E. Treat, of course. The glorious chaos of singing, prancing, perfumed and stinking, the dead and the busy, tragic and achingly otherwise--life itself.

"A winning, offbeat sensibility is at work in the 31 stories and poems that make up Tambour's first fiction collection, finding the lighter side of potentially sober themes and giving humanist spins to scientific ideas. Certain tales show an exotic spirit that puts them squarely in the magic realist tradition, while others reflect self-consciousness about the craft of writing. All but a handful of these stories are original to the volume, which makes a fine introduction
to a writer little known . . ."

- Publishers Weekly

"Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & could never be mistaken for ordinary genre fiction ...don't imagine this as high falutin' 'lit'rature' accessible only to people with advanced degrees. Anyone with a taste for beauty, audacity, sensuality, and wit can find much to enjoy here."

- Faren Miller, Locus

What about Medlars?

I admit it.

These venerable individualists (and I've known many personally) have charmed me ― so much so that they star in "Valley of the Sugars of Salt" and have managed to shove themselves into cameo roles in a couple of other stories here.

Table of Contents

Published by Prime Books
Cover art for

Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales &:
"Red Blood Cells" electron microscope view,
© Tina (Weatherby) Carvalho / MicroAngela
"King Parrot (Alisterus scapularis) " by John Hunter, c.1788, National Library of Australia
Book design: Anna Tambour

Reviews

etc.

SPOTTED LILY

Review "food, the devil, and fame" by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy in his blog Criminal English: April 6, 2006

Nominated for the William L. Crawford Award

Locus listing as Recommended Reading: 2005

Listed by Jeffrey Ford as one of "my favorite reads of 05 in no particular order"

Listed by Vera Nazarian as one of her "Ten Most Memorable Books of 2005"

Rich Horton review SF Site, December 2005

Cheryl Morgan review Emerald City "The Devil in Sydney", #121Sept 2005

Jeffrey Ford review in his blog 14theditch Sept 12 2005

Jeff VanderMeer comments VanderWorld

Sept 12 2005

Publishers Weekly review June 20 2005

Listed in "New and Notable Books" Locus June 2005

Locus review by Faren Miller, May 2005

Vera Nazarian, review

in her blog, Norilana April 19 2005

2004 Australian Science Fiction
(Ditmar) Award Nominee:
Best New Talent

MONTERRA'S DELICIOSA & OTHER TALES &

Faren Miller, review Locus Feb 2004

Publishers Weekly review Dec 22, 2003

Rich Horton, in Lost Pages:
"A Different Drum: Anna Tambour's First Collection Reviewed" Dec 2003

Jeff Vandermeer, in Vanderworld, November 15, 2003

Michael J. Jasper in Tangent:
Review of "Klokwerk's Heart"
January 15, 2001

The
virtuous medlar circle
thoroughly bletted

Guest Features

December 2011

NEW THIS MONTH

Turcotte's Battle

Laura E. Goodin

A LOVED CLASSIC

3 Poems
by Robert DeGraaff
Elegy for Brussels Sprouts
Serial Killers
No Parking in Cambridge, Mass.

Previous Features...

More Irresistibles

More in The Cellar . . .

December 2011

Kindle for Corrections

Who can sit when

Bombay Royale wails?

The baby elephant 'puppet' at Parramasala, created by Erth

Erth's Dinosaur Petting Zoo

(and here's my review of Phantasmagoriana by Adam Browne)

When did you last play hide-and-seek?

Blood and Other Cravings

edited by Ellen Datlow

Turkish Rose Petal Jam

The Book of the Toad

A Natural and Magical History of Toad-Human Relations

by Robert DeGraaff

"Bufonidae"

by Genevieve Valentine

in Phantasmagorium #1

Tales from the Secret Shop

Written by Marc Laidlaw

Painted by Jim Murray

Gallery of Walruses

by Paul Nicklen

Bletting the open arse

False Dogs

by Ethan Fode

The Damned Busters

by Matthew Hughes

I Paid a Bribe

Pulai Millagai: Indian chilli in sweet tamarind sauce

Dante's Inferno Test

TThe Magdalen Female Penitent Asylum Memorial Stone

Decision-making abilities of cells: "They bound the messenger cells with a glowing tag..."

Famous Last Meals

(some would say infamous)

"Those who thought Rector now incapable of understanding his crimes and death sentence may cite his last meal for further support; apparently, Rector didn't eat the pecan pie, believing he could save it for later."

Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies: The Essential Lucy Sussex

Introduction by Delia Sherman
Cover artwork by Deborah Klein

Drawing the Dog

Garden State Love Song

Cabbages and Kings

Gurumustuk Singh:

"As with any digital device that I get, I like to customize it and tinker to make it more personal. That is part of the fun and making it my own ... I don’t even know how many Sikhs use eBook readers however expect that after today, many more will consider getting their very own 'eGurbani Reader'!"

Heli: An automated futuristic helicon

2000 Ancient Tombs

Amazon's corpiracy cahoots

Here endeth the ethics lesson?