The Seers Table!

Janet Holden, Diverse Works Inclusion Community Member

In many parts of the world, the snow is falling, the wind is blowing. Time to settle by a warm fire with a good book, and here are our suggestions for the month of March.

Kate Maruyama recommends:

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press this year. She is a fiction writer, critic, and essayist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Granta, Guernica, Electric Literature, The Paris Review, AGNI, NPR, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books, VICE, and elsewhere. Her stories have been reprinted in Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and Best Women’s Erotica.

She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, the Speculative Literature Foundation, the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, the University of Iowa, the Yaddo Corporation, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Artist in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and lives in Philadelphia with her partner.

Carmen can be found at https://carmenmariamachado.com/.

Linda Addison recommends:

Tawanna Sullivan is one of the founders of Kuma2.net, a Web site that encouraged black lesbians to write erotica. She was raised in Baltimore with a solid foundation in the Baptist church and ’80s horror movies.

Sullivan’s story, “Karma Suture,” is in the Forever Vacancy: A Colors in Darkness horror anthology that explores unexpected things that happen to guests that check into a motel. The Next Girl & Other Lesbian Tales is a collection of her short stories. Other anthologies that contain her short stories include Iridescence: Sensuous Shades of Lesbian Erotica, Swing! Adventures in Swinging by Today’s Top Erotica Writers, and Life, Love & Lust. She is currently working on her first novel.

You can follow Sullivan at https://tawannasullivan.com and on Twitter (@tpsulli).

Lauren Candia recommends:

Zac Brewer is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod series, as well as The Slayer Chronicles series, Soulbound, The Cemetery Boys, The Blood Between Us, and more short stories than he can recall.

He grew up on a diet of TWILIGHT ZONE and books by Stephen King. He chased them down with every drop of horror he could find—in books, movie theaters, on television. The most delicious parts of his banquet, however, he found lurking in the shadowed corners of his dark imagination. When he’s not writing books, he’s skittering down your wall and lurking underneath your bed. Z doesn’t believe in happy endings … unless they involve blood.

He lives in Missouri with his husband, two children, and four furry overlords that some people refer to as “cats.”

Z is represented by Michael Bourret of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management and can be found at http://zacbrewer.com/.

The Blood Between Us—Family secrets turn deadly in this edgy page-turner about the insidious limits of labels and the ties that bind just a little too tightly.

Kate Jonez recommends:

Kelly Robson. “Like you, I’m a passionate reader. I spent most of my teenage years either hanging out at the drugstore waiting for new issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, or when I was in the city, lurking in the SF and Fantasy section of the bookstore. This was pre-Internet and since there were no bookstores in my town and the library was pretty bare, good books—the kind that made my heart sing—were precious treasures. To this day, nothing is more important to me than reading, nothing is more delicious than a great novel, and few people are as important to me as my favorite writers.

“My writing life has been pretty diverse. I’ve edited science books, and from 2008 to 2012 I had the great good luck to write a monthly wine column for Chatelaine, the largest women’s magazine in Canada. My first fiction publications have appeared in 2015 at Tor.com, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and in the anthology New Canadian Noir.

“My favorite writers are Connie Willis, Walter Jon Williams, Michael Bishop, Jack Womack, Hilary Mantel, Alan Bennett, Patrick O’Brian, A.M. Dellamonica, Saladin Ahmed, Gemma Files, Maureen McHugh, Cat Rambo, Peter Watts, and Caitlin Sweet. I have a huge soft spot for classic literature, including Jane Austen, Anne Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hardy, Ford Maddox Ford, John Galsworthy, George Eliot, and Mrs. Gaskell. I also love reading nonfiction—history, historical geography, and science.”

Kelly can be found at http://kellyrobson.com/.

A Human Stain is a disturbing horror novelette about a British expatriate at loose ends who is hired by her friend to temporarily care for his young, orphaned nephew in a remote castle-like structure in Germany.

Janet Holden recommends:

Ania Ahlborn. Born in Ciechanow, Poland, Ania has always been drawn to the darker, mysterious, and sometimes morbid sides of life. Her earliest childhood memory is of crawling through a hole in the chain link fence that separated her family home from the large wooded cemetery next door. She’d spend hours among the headstones, breaking up bouquets of silk flowers so that everyone had their equal share.

Beyond writing, Ania enjoys cooking, baking, movies, and traveling. Learn more about Ania on her site.

Her latest novel is The Devil Crept In, in which a small-town boy investigates the mysterious disappearance of his cousin and uncovers a terrifying secret kept hidden for years.