Short Story Wednesday: the links to the reviews and more: 26 February--with information about the new ownership of THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SF, ELLERY QUEEN'S and ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINES, ASIMOV'S SF and ANALOG fiction magazines

The Penny Press fiction magazine group, which PP had purchased along with sibling puzzle magazines and a few others from Dell Magazines--Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction and Fact--and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, have been sold to a new venture, 1 Paragraph. As Locus has the story:

"Confirmation of this has now appeared on the websites of Asimov’s and Analog, as first reported by Amazing Stories. The ownership language at the bottom of both websites changed recently from '© 2024 PENNY PUBLICATIONS, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED' to '© 2025 1 PARAGRAPH, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Must Read Magazines is a division of Must Read Books Publishing, a 1 Paragraph, Inc. company. No part of Must Read Magazines or this website may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.'"

"No change has appeared as of yet on the F&SF website, but based on other information I’ve received I can confirm they are included in the purchase.

"The new owner of the magazines is Steven Salpeter and a group of investors. Salpeter is the president of literary and IP development at Assemble Media and previously worked as a literary agent for Curtis Brown. According to a profile on Bisprofiles, 1 Paragraph incorporated on January 16, 2025, in Delaware [Locus reported Florida, but that might pertain to other interests of his] and Salpeter is listed as the corporation’s main officer.

"Saltpeter, a big SF/F fan himself, reportedly assembled a group of investors to make the purchase of the three SF/F mags plus Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Sources say that the magazines will stay in print [presumably as newsstand/subscription hardcopy magazines] and with the current editors. Penny Press has owned Asimov’s and Analog [and Queen's and Hitchcock's] since 1996, when it acquired the Dell Magazines group. Gordon Van Gelder became editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1997, and had been [dba Spilogale, Inc.--Van Gelder's father was a zoologist who worked with skunks, among others]  owner and publisher F&SF since 2001, employing Charles Coleman Finlay as editor from 2015-20, and, from 2020 to date, Sheree Renée Thomas."

TM: Ellery Queen's became the bestselling magazine in the Mercury Press group of magazines, which had been established initially to publish H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan's The American Mercury, from EQMM's launch in 1941; and was joined by newsstand book/magazines such as Mercury Mystery. In 1949 MP launched The Magazine of Fantasy, with Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas as editors, which gained its expanded title with its second issue. B. G. Davis bought EQMM from Mercury to help launch Davis Publications (after he left Ziff-Davis) in 1958; Davis Publications would also buy Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine from HSD Publications in 1975, founded Asimov's SF in 1976, and bought Analog from Conde Nast in 1980. EQMM and F&SF will now belong to the same publisher again for the first time since '58; 1 Paragraph might well be eager to promote "media" rights sales for the fiction in the magazines.

And, for various fantastica-relevant news: David Langford: Ansible (this link specifically to #452, the March 2025 issue, but it features links to the archives and future issues, the Ansible Books line, and more), featuring this issue this passage from Barry Malzberg's 1971 novel Gather in the Hall of the Planets, set in and around the 1974 World SF Convention in NYC: 

As We Saw Us. Looking forward to the 1974 New York Worldcon: ‘... a multimedia experience coming from the simultaneous showing of twenty-five famous horror films of the past. It is a marathon event, planned to run through the first three days of the convention, but already, on the first morning, a certain debilitation has set in; people are staggering around the room with glazed expressions and many on the chairs appear to be somnolent or in a drug-induced coma. A few couples towards the fringes seem to be copulating with great difficulty ...’ (K.M. O’Donnell [Barry N. Malzberg], Gather in the Hall of the Planets, 1971)

Short Story Wednesday:

Patricia Abbott: "The World at an Angle: Reasons to Love Short Fiction" by Daisy Johnson, The Guardian, 6 March 2019; "The Face" by Ed Gorman, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1993, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (as cited by Jerry House)

William Emmons: Future, Combined with Science Fiction Stories, May/June 1950, edited by Robert A, W. Lowndes, Part 1; Part 2; Part 3

Jerry House: "The Murder at the Duck Club" by Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard, Pearson's Magazine, January 1913; "The Face" by Ed Gorman (in comments); Sleep No More, Nelson Olmsted's short suspense and horror fiction staged reading series for NBC

Tracy K: The Goodbye Cat, a short story collection by Hiro Arikawa (translated by Philip Gabriel)

George Kelley: Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West, 1950 to the Present edited by Larry McMurtry

B. V. Lawson: Media Murder: "Her Upstairs" by (and read by) Michael Z. Lewin, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July/August 2023, edited by Janet Hutchings

Steve Lewis: Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, October 1967, edited by Frederic Dannay and Clayton Rawson

Todd Mason: "Standards and Practices" by Barry N. Malzberg, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1993, edited by K. K. Rusch, and courtesy of Jerry House; as I noted on Patti Abbott's blog: "And just before Ed Gorman's story in the F&SF issue, Barry's casually brilliant setting of Emily Dickinson in 1993-contemporary NYC, and how things go." (This issue of F&SF was one of the few I'd missed altogether in the '90s, and had never picked it up as a back-issue, missing both Ed's story, which was also collected in Confederacy of the Dead and other volumes, and this one by Barry.)

James Reasoner: Real Western Stories, October 1953 edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes; Silverado Press Presents, Volume 1 edited by Jeffrey Jay Marriotte

Kevin Burton Smith: It's Hammer Time! Send-Ups and Put-Downs of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer  

Kevin Tipple: Black Cat Mystery Magazine, #1, August 2017, edited by John Gregory Betancourt and Carla Coupe

Barry N. Malzberg 1939-2024: short fiction and other reviews; obituary from The Guardian: Short Story Wednesday

Syracuse University classmates Barry Malzberg and Joyce Carol Oates at lunch in a New Jersey diner, the Coach House, in 2022; among the items discussed was an issue of a mid-'60s SU literary magazine issue with contributions from both, and Michael Herr.

Joyce and Barry Malzberg, Robert Friedman (who edits and lays out JCO's Substack blog, A Writer's Journal) and Joyce Carol Oates, from that same luncheon.

photos by Bonnie Veaner

File 770: "Curmudgeonly Breakfast: A Farewells-And-Learn-More-About Barry Malzberg (Last) Round-Up" by Daniel P. Dern

guest essay by Barry Malzberg: NEW AMERICAN REVIEW (later AMERICAN REVIEW), edited by Theodore Solotaroff: the best American literary magazine (you might get a Content Warning on this one,as Barry made reference to a critic's lustful response to certain passages in on NAR story)

Guest FFB: Barry Malzberg and Charles Ardai on the last published Cornell Woolrich novel, as completed by Lawrence Block: INTO THE NIGHT

Barry N. Malzberg, from an interview posted 13 October 2010 at Locus Online:

I did a body of work which represented my best possibility, and some of that could not have been done by anyone else. [Critic, fiction-writer, editor and writing teacher Algis] Budrys could have done [critical volume] Breakfast in the Ruins better, but he didn’t do it at all. Phil Klass [who wrote most of his usually sharply satirical sf as "William Tenn"] could have done Herovit’s World better, but he didn’t. And I think it had to be done.

Obituary: The Guardian

Barry N. Malzberg obituary

This article is more than 1 month oldProlific science fiction writer, among other work, who conceived alternative lives for others, including Emily Dickinson and Sigmund Freud

Steve Holland (with some emendations here by TM)

In 1965, Barry N. Malzberg, who has died aged 85, decided that the career he sought as a "literary" fiction writer was closed to him – most of the "little" magazines were impenetrable, paid poorly and were little-read, the control of editors at publishing houses absolute – and that science fiction (along with fantasy, horror, crime fiction and some other work which also appealed to him), which he had read in his youth, was the path he would pursue into writing.

He made his first sale in sf in 1967 under the name K. M. O’Donnell, and, in the seven years that followed, sold a further 2 million words – 23 novels and six short-story collections, along with further published work not immediately collected. At the end he felt he had succeeded too well and chose to retire, saying: “There is almost no room left for the kind of work which I try to do.”

Those few years had seen Malzberg write some of the most ambitious, challenging and profound, yet pessimistic and not traditionally "crowd-pleasing" novels. His breakthrough came with the John W. Campbell Memorial Award-winner Beyond Apollo (1972) – an ironic win as it was a novel that Campbell would have loathed. Malzberg described it as “dystopian, anti-NASA, anti-space [or at least the hype with which space exploration was sold to the public-TM], enormously cynical about technology”. While it divided fans and critics, the award opened doors to publishers. Malzberg’s literary ambitions intersected with those of the sf "new wave", and his fascination with paranoid astronauts, the John F. Kennedy assassination and “what if?” alternate lives of historical figures (Emily Dickinson is a successful poet in her lifetime, Sigmund Freud ventures into outer space) led to him being spoken of in the same breath as JG Ballard, Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison.

Malzberg was born in New York, the son of Michael, a salesman with a lumber company, and his wife, Celia (nee Feinberg). He was educated locally in Brooklyn public schools and then at Syracuse University. Leaving with a degree in sociology in 1960, Malzberg joined the New York City Department of Welfare as an investigator, and also worked as a reimbursement agent at the New York State Department of Mental Health.

He had long wanted to be a writer and made his first attempts aged seven. In 1951 he discovered science fiction magazines, and received his first rejection slip from Amazing Stories aged 11. He favoured the unique, frequently satirical voices in Horace Gold’s Galaxy magazine over Campbell’s tech-driven (if often also mystical) Astounding, especially such writers as Alfred Bester, Walter M Miller, Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth, Robert Sheckley and Theodore Sturgeon.

At high school, though, Malzberg decided he wanted to be a contemporary/mimetic writer, inspired most directly by Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, John Updike and James Agee. With the offer of two writing fellowships, he returned to Syracuse University in 1964-65 but despite the chance of a further year, “drowning in rejection”, and in debt to the New York State Loan Fund, he joined the Scott Meredith Literary Agency (SMLA).

His job there involved reading and reporting on up to 50 manuscripts a week from fee-paying newcomers for a cut of the enclosed cheque. So adept was he that he was taking home over $200 a week by the time he was fired in 1967 (“for reasons never made clear”). He became, briefly, managing editor of the men’s magazine Escapade (there accepting Ms. Jody Scott's first novel Down Will Come Baby and editing it to novella length to fit in the magazine) and, later, the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories and the fantasy/sf magazine Fantastic – but was again fired after arguing with the publisher (most directly, over the cover illustration he'd accepted for a Fritz Leiber story). By then he was selling his own fiction.

Malzberg had aimed high, hoping to write like Mailer but emulate the success of Philip Roth and win the National Book award by the age of 26. Indifferent editors turned down more than 100 of his stories, and Malzberg was already 26 when he sold "The Bed" (as Nathan Herbert, 1966) to Wildcat magazine, a tenth-rate Playboy knockoff.

He struggled on until, finally, "We’re Coming Through the Window" (1967), a comic time-travel tale, sold to Galaxy, under the byline "K. M. O’Donnell" (in tribute to Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore, a married couple, who wrote impressive and innovative fiction of varying sorts, in collaboration and separately, under their own names and using varying pseudonyms such as "Lawrence O'Donnell"; another loose inspiration might've been the old comic song "They're Coming through the Window"). A breakthrough came with the novella "Final War" (1968), the story of a soldier trapped in an endless, meaningless war.

While working at SMLA he had written a novel, which was published as Love Doll under the name Mel Johnson in 1967, and was followed by two dozen more softcore porn books until the market collapsed. He returned to science fiction novels, beginning with The Falling Astronauts (1971), and including Revelations (1972), Herovit’s World (1973), In the Enclosure (1973), Tactics of Conquest (1974), The Destruction of the Temple (1974), On a Planet Alien (1974), Guernica Night (1975) and Galaxies (1975).

He also wrote a series of increasingly subversive "men's adventure" novels (the Lone Wolf series as Mike Barry), novelisations (Phase IV, Kung Fu) and adult novels (as Lee W. Mason).

Although he announced his retirement in 1976, he continued to write fiction, including thrillers and crime stories with Bill Pronzini and, solo, one final science fiction novel, The Remaking of Sigmund Freud (1985). In addition there were many short stories, the best to be found in In the Stone House (2000), Shiva and Other Stories (2001), The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg (2013) and Collecting Myself (2024).

He also compiled anthologies and collections, often championing neglected authors such as Mark Clifton and F. L. Wallace, writing reviews, columns (including Dialogues with Mike Resnick, collected as The Business of Science Fiction, 2010) and essays, many collected in The Engines of the Night (1982; expanded as Breakfast in the Ruins, 2007) and The Bend at the End of the Road (2018).

Malzberg is survived by his wife, Joyce Zelnick, whom he married in 1964, and their daughters, Stephanie and Erika.

Barry Nathaniel Malzberg, author and editor, born 24 July 1939; died 19 December 2024

Barry N. Malzberg,  July 24, 1939-December 19, 2024--Jeet Heer in The Nation

Sweet Freedom reviews of Barry's work, and notations and selections by him:

Todd Mason: "Standards and Practices" by Barry N. Malzberg, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1993, edited by K. K. Rusch, and courtesy of Jerry House; as I noted on Patti Abbott's blog: "And just before Ed Gorman's story in the F&SF issue, Barry's casually brilliant setting of Emily Dickinson in 1993-contemporary NYC, and how things go." (This issue of F&SF was one of the few I'd missed altogether in the '90s, and had never picked it up as a back-issue, missing both Ed's story, which was also collected in Confederacy of the Dead and other volumes, and this one by Barry, till now.)

Books Received: COLLECTING MYSELF: THE UNCOLLECTED STORIES OF BARRY N. MALZBERG, edited by Robert Friedman and Gregory Shepard; CREAM OF THE CROP: BEST MYSTERY & SUSPENSE STORIES OF BILL PRONZINI edited by the author, Stark House 2024

Short Story Wednesday: Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini: FINAL WAR AND OTHER FANTASIES (Ace 1969) and IN THE POCKET AND OTHER SCIENCE FICTION STORIES (Ace 1971) by Barry N. Malzberg: newly offered together; THE HANGING MAN AND OTHER WESTERN STORIES by Bill Pronzini, including one in collaboration with Marcia Muller; Stark House 2024

SSW: DARK AT HEART edited by Karen and Joe R. Lansdale (Dark Harvest 1992); LORD JOHN TEN edited by Dennis Etchison (Lord John Press 1988); STALKERS edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg (Roc/New American Library 1993)

Among his contributions to our Monthly Music recommendations: 

Barry N. Malzberg: Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 3 in D Minor; Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Georg Solti; Bruckner: Symphony No. 6: Frankfort Radio Symphony conducted by Christoph Eschenbach

SSW: Fritz Leiber's novella YOU'RE ALL ALONE; WHAT DID MISS DARRINGTON SEE? edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson and THE FANTASTIC PULPS edited by Peter Haining; NEGLECTED VISIONS edited by Barry N. Malzberg, Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander (Doubleday 1979): Short Story Wednesday

FFB: Sheila Kohler: STORIES FROM ANOTHER WORLD (Ontario Review Press 2003); Barry N. Malzberg: THE MAN WHO LOVED THE MIDNIGHT LADY (Stories) (Doubleday 1980)

SSW: John D. MacDonald: "The Accomplice" (a previously unpublished short story), THE STRAND MAGAZINE, December 2024: Short Story Wednesday

From the FictionMags Index (with page numbers, etc., added):

The Strand Magazine [Issue LXXIV, (December) 2024] ed. Andrew F. Gulli (The Strand Magazine, $8.95 US/$10.95 Canadian), 56pp + covers, quarto) [] 4 · The Accomplice · John D. MacDonald · ss (illustration by Jeffrey B. McKeever) [not the same as the story of the same name in Who Done It? ed. Alice Laurance & Isaac Asimov (Houghton Mifflin, 1980).] 12 · Navigational Hazard · Paul Theroux · ss 22 · The Adventure of the Hapless Brother [Sherlock Holmes] · Derrick Belanger · ss (illustration by Jeffrey B. McKeever) 34 · To Muddy Death · Elizabeth Wells · ss 41 · Lizzy in the Morning · John Floyd · ss 43 · Interview with Greg Iles · Andrew F. Gulli · iv [Ref. Greg Iles] 46 * Book/DVD Reviews * br/fr _46 * Against the Grain by Peter Lovesey * Martin Edwards * br _46 * Anatomy of a Fall  (2024 film) * Chris Chan * fr _48 * Assassins Anonymous by Rob Hart * Jeremy Burns * br _50 * False Idols: A Reluctant King Novel by K'wan * Chris Chan * br _51 * Jack's Boys by John Katzenbach * Chris Chan * br _52 * Shadowheart by Meg Gardiner * Chris Chan * br _53 * The Stark House Anthology edited by Rick Ollerman and Gregory Shepard * Chris Chan * br _53 * The Waiting by Michael Connelly * John B. Valeri * br _54 * The Wayside by Caroline Wolff * Chris Chan * br "The Accomplice" is an early story by John D. MacDonald (who never wrote anything actually titled Cape Fear, but more on that below), one which was not published till this issue of The Strand, though I'm not sure why MacDonald didn't circulate it. It's not one of his best stories, to be sure, but it's a reasonably good, even mildly thoughtful, bit of kitchen-sink hardboiled writing that will do his memory no damage. A not terribly bright and reasonably tough 17-year-old young man, recently hired at a small grocery store, catches the eye of the wife and co-proprietor of the shop, who encourages him to think about throwing in with her to dispose of her coworker/owner husband and what comes of that. It's rather deft, even if MacDonald was still becoming the JDM of not many years later and for the rest of his career, and the resolution isn't a hackneyed one, even more than 3/4ths of a century after its composition, as editor Andrew Gulli is happy to note. Gulli makes a regular habit of looking for "lost"/unpublished work by legendary crime-fiction writers (and some less well-known for CF) to highlight, and leads off his editorial in this issue by noting how he was introduced to MacDonald's work by the first (of two, so far) films called Cape Fear (based on JDM's brilliant novel The Executioners, a fact which Gulli fails to note, albeit some editions of the paperback reprints have all but replaced the novel's title with the films'). What's (also) problematic about this elision is that both films, very much including the better first adaptation, are dumbed-down considerably from JDM's novel, which involves two parents, and their family (not least their daughter), imperiled by a vicious ex-con seeking revenge against the attorney father...the parents become the Executioners of the title, and this is dealt with in the novel far more sensibly and engagingly than in either film, as well as with a gravitas that is completely absent from either film. (Also, Gulli notes in passing the similarity of approach and sophistication Ross Macdonald's work had in several key ways with JDM's, while somewhat adorably adding "no relation"--which the different spelling of the names might've tipped the casual reader to, though Gulli could also have noted that RM's actual name was Kenneth Millar.) A useful rundown of the plot/incident differences between the novel and the two film adaptations. Nonetheless, it's good to have this story available, though one wonders if The Strand is doing all the business it might these days, as the 12/24 issue is still the current one, which I bought today from the increasingly barren newsstands of the most nearby B&N chain bookstore (picked up the "Dell"/Penny Press fiction magazines, and the current issues of DownBeat and The Nation), in what for me amounts to a lavish splurge these days. A "new" JDM story bumped out the half-done SSW I had planned; this current issue of The Strand asks newsstand proprietors to display it till May, so one presumably has some time yet to pick it up, where it hasn't sold out.  For more of today's stories and assemblies of same (and at least one short play this week), please see Patti Abbott's blog.