We're pleased to announce that the signed limited edition of N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became is in stock and shipping..

All of the art is already done for the follow-up to City, The World We Make.

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As you'll see below, The City We Became was honored with starred reviews from all the major trade publications.

From the Author's Website:

Five New Yorkers must come together to defend their city from an ancient evil in this stunning new novel by Hugo Award-winner and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin.

Every great city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She’s got six.

But every city also has a dark side. A roiling, ancient evil stirs in the halls of power, threatening to destroy the city and her six newborn avatars unless they can come together and stop it once and for all.

Deluxe Limited Edition Features:

• Oversized 7 x 10 trim size
• Printed on 70# Finch
• Two color printing throughout
• Wraparound full-color dust jacket illustration
• Four full-page full-color interior illustrations
• Sewn binding
• Cloth covered boards

Limited: 500 signed numbered hardcover copies: $185

From Publishers Weekly (Starred Review):

“The staggering contemporary fantasy that launches three-time Hugo Award-winner Jemisin’s new duology (following the Broken Earth series) leads readers into the beating heart of New York City for a stunning tale of a world out of balance... Blending the concept of the multiverse with New York City arcana, this novel works as both a wry adventure and an incisive look at a changing city. Readers will be thrilled.”

From Booklist (Starred Review):

“While a marked shift from Jemisin’s usual creation of magical other worlds, this contemporary fantasy of living cities in a multiversal struggle demonstrates her accomplished storytelling and characterization. Highly recommended for anyone interested in some of the most exciting and powerful fantasy writing of today.”

From Library Journal (Starred Review):

“Jemisin (The Broken Earth) writes a harsh love story to one of America’s most famous places. As raw and vibrant as the city itself, the prose pushes the boundaries of fantasy and brings home what residents already know—their city is alive.”

From Kirkus (Starred Review):

“The novel is a bold calling out of the racial tensions dividing not only New York City, but the U.S. as a whole; it underscores that people of color are an integral part of the city’s tapestry even if some White people prefer to treat them as interlopers. It's no accident that the only White avatar is the racist woman representing Staten Island, nor that the Enemy appears as a Woman in White who employs the forces of racism and gentrification in her invasion; her true self is openly inspired by the tropes of the xenophobic author H.P. Lovecraft. Although the story is a fantasy, many aspects of the plot draw on contemporary incidents.”

The response to Peter Straub’s unfinished novel, Wreckage, accompanied by the supplemental volume, What Happens in Hello Jack, has been hugely gratifying.

Bev Vincent covered the two-book set in depth in Cemetery Dance Online.

We’ll leave you with a few snapshots from his investigation of Peter’s work, the first from a 2016 interview with the author, conducted by Adrian Van Young, that appeared in Electric Literature:

These days and for maybe three years now I work away, when permitted by health and hospitals, on a long strange novel called Hello Jack. Jack the Ripper is invoked by a devoted admirer. The fifth-richest woman in America murders her dying husband. A black, retired homicide detective works as a private chauffeur, in which capacity he does a lot of good. Henry James pops up, thinking hard, as does the 12-year-old Aleister Crowley. There’s a weird painting, but no one can figure it out.

In the review proper, Vincent wrote:

“One notable aspect of Straub’s writing is that even characters mentioned in passing are given grace notes and interesting observations that make them feel real. He was also intensely curious about the origins of his characters. Margaret Hayward, for example, is only mentioned in passing in earlier works, but a discussion with Wolfe led him to explore her life to the extent that she is a co-lead of Wreckage, arguably its protagonist. Margot, whose favorite writer is Henry James, is married to the ‘wondrous terrible’ Harry Mountjoy, a much older, wealthy, and ruthless businessman. After suffering at his hands for several years, she decides to hasten his end-of-life process, enrolling her in the homicidal tradition of the Hayward family. However, this is her sole nefarious deed, and the rest of her story involves her efforts to do good things with her new status as the one of the richest women in the world.”

And later:

“[Otto Sven] Harbin is one of the book’s most intriguing characters. As a Black man in the 1950s, he is often unwelcome in the upscale places Margot frequents, although she uses her power and influence to shame people into admitting him. He has contented himself to remain Margot’s chauffeur despite a significant legacy from Mountjoy’s will, but the investigative skills he acquired as a police detective come in handy while protecting her.”

A final reminder before the event...

John Scalzi will visit our warehouse on Wednesday, September 10, 2025 to sign copies of his brand new novel, The Shattering Peace.

While there, he will also sign copies of his novel published earlier this year, When the Moon Hits Your Eye.

Don't miss an easy chance to add to your signed Scalzi collection, with two stellar novels!

Charnel House has announced the signed limited edition of Tim Powers’ upcoming novel, The Mills of the Gods, and the print run is only 150 numbered copies.

Please place your order ASAP. We have to let Charnel House know how many copies we need very soon.

Signed, Numbered Edition Features:

• Printed on 80# Mohawk Superfine;
• Handbound in full mint colored Toile Du Marais French linen;
• A printed label of the Paris catacombs inlaid within the front board.

Limited: 150 numbered copies signed by the author: $350

Elizabeth Bear, the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Astounding Award winning author of dozens of novels; over a hundred short stories; and a number of essays, nonfiction, and opinion pieces for markets as diverse as Popular Mechanics and The Washington Post is publishing Angel Maker, a new novel in her Karen Memory series, which you can (and should!) preorder here. We asked writer Kat Howard to interview her about the new book, and are delighted to share that conversation with you.

A note from Kat: For those of you who might be hesitant to pick up the third book in a series without first reading the other two, don’t be! While there are a couple of moments that may work better if you’ve read the other books in the series, Angel Maker is self-contained enough that there’s no reason you couldn’t begin here.

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I know fans of this series (Karen Memory, Stone Mad) will be delighted that you returned to it. Can you tell readers a little more about your choice to continue Karen’s story, and to self-publish it?

I’m thrilled to be back in Rapid City too! I actually started writing Angel Maker back in 2016 or 2017, but I had other books under contract and it turns out that this has been an extremely complicated eight years or so, so my production hasn’t been as fast as I would have wanted. So I didn’t have time to finish it until 2023. 

By the time I had a completed book, my editor for the previous two books had retired, and the series was “orphaned” as the expression goes. Also, steampunk is a tough sell to a trad publisher right now, and they didn’t buy it when I pitched it as a lesbian adventure novel.

In Angel Maker, Karen and Priya sign up as crew on a motion picture about a Wild West show, and wind up embroiled in danger when a double murder is committed on set. Priya and a Mechanical called Cowboy are accused of the crime, and of course the only way to get them out of hot water is for Karen to solve the mystery—and save the day!

I deeply believe in this book’s ability to please the Karen Memory audience, and I really want to see it in the world. So I’m going it on my own.

Karen is extremely good with horses. I know from social media that you have an adorable Icelandic horse of your own. Are there parts of Karen’s skills that you share? Did you borrow any of the traits of your horse for the ones in this book?

Karen is much better with horses than I am. She grew up around them and has actual horse training skills. I know just about enough to write a much better horsewoman than I will ever be!

The primary horses in Angel Maker are Karen’s horse Molly; Bill and Copper, a pair of movie stunt horses for the motion picture Karen and Priya wind up working on; and the titular Angel Maker.

As Karen says of Angel Maker, “Every cowboy story has got to have the horse nobody can ride.”

None of them is particularly like my gelding, Ormr, though Copper has some of his steadfastness and refusal to panic in a tight situation, which is a great quality in a trail horse! Or a stunt horse for that matter.

Karen, being a much better rider than I am, can handle a wider variety of animals.

What draws you to the Western setting and genre?

You know, the funny thing is, I don’t think of myself as particularly drawn to Westerns—that’s just the place where Karen and her friends and loved ones happen to live. I don’t think I could have written the story I wanted to write in another setting, so I sort of wound up by default in a Gold Rush town.

That said, it’s a great era for examining the roots of all sorts of social and civil problems we still wrestle with in America today. So much of our modern American culture derives from the Myth of the West—and it really is a myth, a brief period of westward expansion by European settlers that really wasn’t anything like we’re taught in school.

So one of the things I want to point up in the Karen Memory Adventures is how diverse and complex and morally gray the whole “Wild West” actually was. I want to give room to all those people, rather than writing a triumphalist narrative of Westward expansion that ignores government-sponsored genocide.

Angel Maker has not only Western elements, but Steampunk ones as well. What other works in those genres would you recommend to readers?

For fans of Karen Memory, I would recommend Charles Portis’ novel True Grit and Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker and sequels. I’m also a fan of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, but that one comes with every content warning in the world—it’s a tragedy and a critique of toxic masculinity and wow, can that be rough going occasionally.

I also very much like the Jonah Hex graphic novels written by Joe R. Lansdale and drawn by Tim Truman, and Ian Tregillis’s trilogy starting with The Mechanical. Those are a bit more on the grimmer side than Karen, though.

There are a couple of characters in here that readers may recognize from our world Had you always planned on including them, or were they a surprise? Did you learn anything interesting in researching those characters that you’d like to share?

I like to put a real-world character or two in each of the Karen Memory Adventures if I can, because I like playing with the alternate history of it. One of the people who really existed in Angel Maker is Miss Phoebe “Annie” Mosley, better known to most as Annie Oakley. She’s the person who Karen is hired to stunt double in the motion picture that the plot—and the murder mystery—center around.

I knew from the getgo that I was going to be using Annie in this book, and I had a grand old time researching her and getting a feel for her voice and character. She and Karen have a bit in common, both being accomplished horsewomen who were raised poor and made good on it one way or the other, so she seemed like a natural fit and a good foil for Karen.

The other real-world person who gets an appearance in Angel Maker is a famous lawyer, but I think I’ll keep their exact identity under my hat.

Are there any other works or projects of yours that you’d like to call readers’ attention to?

I’m currently at work on a sequel to Ancestral Night and Machine, which will be book four in the White Space universe. Book three was titled The Folded Sky, and was released earlier this year.

I’m also working on a cozy mystery series as Sarah Lynch that I am likely to self-publish starting next year.