Aug 7, 2016 | announcement

Issue 35 — August 2016

by Brian J. White

Welcome to Issue 35! We’ve had a busy month at Fireside. If you haven’t seen our special report on racism and the underrepresentation of black writers in short fiction magazines, along with the series of essays that goes with it, you can check it out here. The numbers are sobering, critical, and utterly unsurprising.

We’ve also been talking a lot about Year 5, which starts in January. We have a lot of plans, but also a lot to button down in terms of funding and sustainability. More on that later, but if you want to get a jump start now, take a look at our Patreon. It will be the only way to get ebooks in Year 5. Much more on this soon.

On to the issue! We open with a fantastic short piece as Lauren Roy returns to Fireside with In Memoriam: Lady Fantastic, which muses on the way great women — superwomen, even — are often done a disservice by the media in death. Next come two more stories selected by guest editor Daniel José Older. First is S.M. Mack’s Ariadne, Abandoned on Naxos, which takes you inside a piece of Greek mythology and its tangled web of love, loss, and freedom. Then we have Alexis A. Hunter’s Your Body, By Default, which takes you inside a body that is not your own, and then tears you apart. It’s got a fantastic illustration by Galen Dara. Thanks, as always, for reading.

© 2016 Brian J. White

About the author

Brian started Fireside Fiction Company in 2012 as an experiment in crowdfunding and paying speculative fiction writers well above the accepted professional rate at the time. It worked! Thanks, have a great day!

Brian has been informed he has to write more in his bio. Fine! Brian took that experiment through five Kickstarters (and did not die!) and into a subscription model. During his tenure, Fireside published 150 stories, five novels, and one novella, and also published the first #BlackSpecFic report, which examined the massive under-representation of Black short-story writers in the field, prompting conversation, reflection, and change in the speculative fiction community. It remains one of the most important things he has worked on in his adult life. Brian was a 2017 World Fantasy Award finalist in the Special Award, Non-Professional category for Fireside, and Fireside has been nominated for multiple Hugo Awards.

Facing the burnout that is all too common among people who work at small presses, Brian stepped down as editor and publisher in 2017 to regroup and recharge mentally. He returned as interim editorial director in 2020 and resumed full ownership of the company in June 2021 with a great team you can read about below.

In the wider world, Brian is a former journalist who worked as an editor at The Courier-Journal in Louisville from 2006–2010 and at the Boston Globe from 2010–2018, where he was part of the staff that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting in 2014 for the newspaper’s coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2014. He still lives around Boston, where he works as an editor for a private company and takes photographs, paints miniatures, and spends time with his amazing wife and various cats.