I have a new volume available from Peggy Bright books. Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear is a sampler anthology from Australia. Contributors include: my friends Sean McMullen and Anna Tambour; Jo Anderton, who has novels out from Angry Robot; and Thoraiya Dyer whose work the Galactic Suburbia crew keep enthusing about.

Also of interest is the fact that Peggy Bright are offering all three of their books as a cut price bundle. I’ve discovered that this is very easy for me to do with the new store, and I’m hoping other publishers will provide similar offerings.

This reminds me that some publishers are already offering omnibus editions of various series. These are very good value. For example, Steven Harper’s Silent Empire series comprises four novels that are available for only £4.99. To help you find these things I have created a special category for omnibus editions.

Our friends at Aqueduct Press might mainly sell books by women, but they sell books by all sorts of women. Here are a few books that I recently uploaded that might be on interest if you want to broaden your reading.

• Ancient, Ancient – Kiini Ibura Salaam
• Distances – Vandana Singh
• Redwood and Wildfire – Andrea Hairston
• Shotgun Lullabies – Sheree Rene Thomas
• Of Love and Other Monsters – Vandana Singh

This week is your last chance to take advantage of the 30% off sale of Lethe Press books in the bookstore. There are some very fine books available at a bargain price. After Bristol Pride on Saturday they will all revert to their usual prices. Check them out.

Outside we’ve been deluged with water. Inside I have been deluged with books from Aqueduct Press. I have been busy adding them to the shop. There will be a lot more going live over the next few days, but for now I want to highlight just one. I am delighted to be able to offer for sale the winner of the 2011 James Tiptree, Jr. Award; Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston. Just click through and read some of the reviews, OK?

One of the great things about independent booksellers is that they are often big supporters of independent presses. In that spirit, I’m delighted to be able to bring you the latest release from a top Australian publisher. Showtime by Narrelle M. Harris is the latest in the Twelve Planets series of short collections by Australian women writers. This one is about families; horrible families. Or perhaps more accurately, families of horrors. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I can’t help but warm to a book that contains a story called “The truth about Brains” which begins as follows:

My little brother Dylan is dead, but that doesn’t stop him from being a pest. He still follows me everywhere, and Mum still makes me take him with me when I go to the shops.

Unsurprisingly, the introduction is by Seanan McGuire. You can find out more about the book (and buy it) here.

This appears to be only a UK thing, but hopefully it can be a good excuse for the rest of the world to be kind to independent booksellers too. There’s a whole lot more about the event at its official website, and if you are UK-based you should go there to find out more about independent bookstores in your area.

For my own part I’d like to recommend Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights and Toppings, both in Bath (Toppings is also in Ely). They are generalist bookstores and so don’t sell a huge amount of science fiction and fantasy, but they are staffed by people who love books and who are happy to recommend good writing no matter what the subject matter. They also do great events. A shout out too for Hydra Books in Bristol who have lots of interesting political books, and are very happy to stock LGBT-themed work. Forbidden Planet in Bristol are lovely people too, though I’m not sure how small you have to be to qualify as independent.

While this is theoretically a UK event, I can’t let such a thing go by without a mention of Borderlands Books in San Francisco, which is everything you could want in an science fiction and fantasy specialist. The Other Change of Hobbit in Berkeley is great too. I understand they’ve been going through some rough times of late, but I think they are open again now. And then there’s Dark Carnival, also in Berkeley, which in all my years of living in the Bay Area I never managed to visit.

Yes, there are three specialist SF&F bookstores in the Bay Area. Is it any wonder I miss the place so much?

Finally, of course, I have my own bookstore. I suspect that some of the supporters of Independent Booksellers Week will see me as part of the Evil Empire. A lot of the publicity I’m seeing for the event talks about shopping locally. But it simply isn’t practical for every small town to have an independent bookstore, and anyway most of what I sell is only available through SF&F specialists, so I think I count. More to the point, I’ve been deluged with new books in the past few days and I’m going to take IBW as an excuse to talk about them a lot.

Yesterday we had the July editions of Clarkesworld and Lightspeed added to the store. I wrote about them here. I’m also finishing up adding a pile of new books from Book View Cafe. The latest additions have been works by Jeffrey A. Carver. They are hard-ish SF, and probably the most interesting title is Eternity’s End, which was a Nebula nominee.

Those of you who follow the Wizard’s Tower Twitter feed will have seen me add a whole lot of books from Book View Cafe recently. We have, for example, all five volumes of Irene Radford’s “Merlin’s Descendents” series. Probably the most famous books, however, are the first two volumes of Judith Tarr’s “Hound and Falcon” series: The Isle of Glass and The Golden Horn. I’m assuming that The Hounds of God will appear in due course. In the meantime, here’s some fine reading.

Back in 1997 the vast VanderMeer empire that we know today was a mere collection of spores seeking to insinuate their way into the fabric of the SF&F community. Even then, however, it was exuding weirdness from every mycelium. One of the most glorious efflorescences of the Ministry of Whimsy Press was a surrealist novel called The Troika. Written by Stepan Chapman, it won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1998 and is one of the few winners of that prize that is more weird than anything written by Dick himself. It is one of the books that I choose to review in Emerald City #100.

The book is long out of print, and a new copy will set you back over $100. However, Jeff’s new ebook company, Cheeky Frawg, has just brought out an electronic edition. And yes, I have it in the store.

Update: Neil Clarke informs me that, while the book is published in conjunction with Cheeky Frawg, it is still a Ministry of Whimsy title, and these days the Ministry is an imprint of Wyrm Publishing. It is a complicated business, publishing, even at the small press level.

Beneath the glare of three purple suns, three travelers – an old Mexican woman, an automated jeep, and a brontosaurus – have trudged across a desert for hundreds of years. They do not know if the desert has an end, and if it does, what they might find there. Sometimes they come across perfectly-preserved cities, but without a single inhabitant, and never a drop of rain. Worse still, they have no memory of their lives before the desert. Only at night, in dreams, do they recall fragments of their past identities.

The Troika. There’s nothing else like it.

I’ve just sent out a press release announcing that Wizard’s Tower will be producing ebook editions of Juliet McKenna’s Tales of Einarinn series. That’s five books, which will double our output.

We don’t have publication dates yet as the process of turning paper books into ebooks is (as Juliet has explained) quite complicated, but I’ll keep you informed as the process goes forward.

At this time of cities all around the world are running LGBT Pride events. San Francisco gets in on the action on June 23-24; London’s big day is July 7th; and there’s actually a thing called World Pride Month that this year is running from June 17th to July 8th.

In recognition of all this, Lethe Press are having a grand sale of all of their titles available through my ebook store. And I have persuaded Steve Berman to let it run a little long so that we can finish on Bristol Pride day, July 14th. The sale prices went up yesterday, and you can see all of the books and magazines on sale here. Everything is at least 33% off. A few titles are even cheaper as they were already on sale.

Here are some of the very fine books that you can pick up cheaply:

• Shadow Man, Melissa Scott (my review)
• Diana Comet, Sandra McDonald
• Disturbed by Her Song, Tanith Lee
• Engines of Desire, Livia Llewelyn
• Beyond Binary, Brit Mandelo (ed.)
• Heiresses of Russ, JoSelle Vanderhooft & Steve Berman (eds.)
• Wilde Stories 2011, Steve Berman (ed.)

A fair few UK readers very wisely fled the country over Jubilee week. And quite rightly too given the awful weather we had. But if you were on a beach somewhere last week you may have missed the announcement of a new book from Wizard’s Tower. It is Turns & Chances, a stand-alone novella from Juliet E. McKenna. The book was originally a limited edition offering from PS Publishing, and the paper version is now out of print, so this is something that many of Juliet’s fans will not have. You can find out more about it in the bookstore.

I am delighted to announce that the latest book from Wizard’s Tower Press is now available for purchase. As I mentioned last week, Turns and Chances is a stand-alone novella set in Juliet McKenna’s world of Einarinn. It introduces us to the country of Lescar, which became the setting for the Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution series. Juliet talks about the book here. You can buy it in our bookstore now. It will become available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo over the next few days.