Diet Soap, Issue 2: Sex and Gender

Diet Soap’s website—and, indeed, the magazine itself—suggest that it’s meant as a provocative publication. Well, I have to admit that I didn’t find issue #2 to be quite that; but it does have some good stories that make telling points about the subject of sex and gender...

The full review is available online at The Fix.

Further links:
Diet Soap
Stephanie Burgis
Ginnetta Correli
Chelsea Martin
Katherine Sparrow

Abyss & Apex, Issue 26: Second Quarter 2008

This was my first encounter with Abyss & Apex, a generalist speculative fiction webzine that seeks to publish “powerful stories with emotion that resonates in our minds and hearts long after the first reading” and “stories that stand out from the norm even in a genre that pushes the envelope of normal.” With the five stories of issue 26, I would say they haven’t quite hit that mark...

The full review is available online at The Fix.

Further links:
Abyss & Apex
Andrew S. Fuller
Laura Anne Gilman
Larry Hodges
Vylar Kaftan
Lawrence M. Schoen

Light Reading by Aliya Whiteley

Prudence Green and Lena Patten are best friends, brought together by their marriages to officers in the Royal Air Force. Their husbands are currently away on duty, and the two women are dissatisfied with their lives back home on the base. Excitement of sorts arrives in December 2004, when Pru finds one of the other RAF wives hanging, because her husband is having an affair - with Lena's husband. At which point, it may appear that Light Reading is going to be a run-of-the-mill potboiler...but it's not so...

The full review is available online at The Zone.

Further links:
Aliya Whiteley
Macmillan New Writing