I love Peter Mohrbacher’s cover for the May issue of Clarkesworld, a gorgeously creepy piece titled “Ananiel, Angel of Storms” (click the image at right for a bigger version.) Mohrbacher has covered other Clarkesworlds — mostly recent issue 111 — but this is the first to really make me sit up and take notice.

Robert L Turner III at Tangent Online raves about Rich Larson this issue, calling him “an excellent new talent.”

“Jonas and the Fox” by Rich Larson is set in a post revolution farming community. Fox is a poet and fugitive from the new junta after the revolution starts to eat its own. He is hiding in the body of his nephew who is brain dead after an accidental fall. His Nephew Jonas, the other title character, must come to terms with the stranger inhabiting his brother’s body. The novelette cleverly links the revolution’s rewriting of history with the disconnect between Fox and his new body. The story is touching, and manages to keep you guessing as to how it will end. Larson is a young author and well worth keeping an eye on. If this piece is representative of his work, we could be looking at an excellent new talent.

Read his complete review here.

Clarkesworld #116 has five new stories by Cat Rambo, Robert Reed, Cassandra Khaw, Rich Larson, and Luo Longxiang, and two reprints by Joe Abercrombie and Sunny Moraine.

Short stories featured this issue are:

“Left Behind” by Cat Rambo
“The Universal Museum of Sagacity” by Robert Reed
“Breathe” by Cassandra Khaw
“Jonas and the Fox” by Rich Larson
“Away from Home” by Luo Longxiang
“Tough Times All Over” by Joe Abercrombie (from Rogues, 2014)
“A Heap of Broken Images” by Sunny Moraine (from We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology, 2013)

The non-fiction is:

Destination: Venus by Andrew Liptak
Transcendent Transformation: A Conversation with James Gunn by Chris Urie
Another Word: Strange Stars by Jason Heller
Editor’s Desk: Stress Relief by Neil Clarke

Clarkesworld typically posts several Podcasts during the month. The first two are:

Left Behind by Cat Rambo read by Kate Baker
The Universal Museum of Sagacity by Robert Reed read by Dan Kelly

We last covered Clarkesworld with Issue 115.

Clarkesworld is edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace, and published by Wyrm Publishing. The contents are available for free online; individual issues can be purchased for $3.99, and monthly subscriptions are $2.99/month. A 6-month sub is $17.94, and the annual price is $35.88. Learn more and order individual issues at the magazine’s website.

See the complete issue here.

Our Late April Magazine Rack is here. See all of our recent fantasy magazine coverage here.