PANDASTIC TIMES:
The Spell From the Deep Cave
By Amal Naj
A Spell from the Faraway Jungle has sent humans all over the world into hiding in their shuttered homes.
This is good news for animals all over the planet; they have come out of hiding and are enjoying a life of complete freedom out in the open.
A thirteen-year-old girl named Cathrin is caught in between her joy of seeing the animals in her backyard frolicking with complete abandonment and her father’s mission to destroy the Spell.
READ MOREShe embarks on a journey to the Faraway Jungle as she explores the cursed world and encounters the unlikely sorcerer of the Spell who is bent on avenging the killing of innocent animals—and makes a pact for a new order of life in which humans and animals live openly as good neighbors.
"This illustrated story for young readers is a Covid-19 allegory clothed in the trappings of a sweet fairy tale..."
READ LESSForthcoming Books
Yrth Trilogy by S.P. Somtow
An epic series by World Fantasy Award winning author S.P. Somtow
A timeless story reinvented for the 21st Century: with the sweep of Lord of the Rings and the spectacle of Dune
An eon from now, humans are mostly a memory, wiped out by war and their own hubris, living on the fringes. Yrth is a desolate wasteland, but life has started to return. New races have begun to live in the wasteland, finding their own harmony with their environment. Some have evolved from what were once thought of as animals. Others were created to make real the myths and imaginings of the departed humans. These races have created pockets of utopia.
But will they repeat the mistakes of past, and return Yrth to the realm of shadow? Can many species become a united world?
READ MORES.P. Somtow, brilliant and prolific writer of science and fantasy fiction, imagines an Earth where humans have brought themselves to near oblivion with their internecine conflicts, and animals have filled the void while evolving into creatures with extraordinary intelligence and capabilities, which surpass those of their near-extinct predecessors. But they are about to fall prey to the follies that destroyed the humans. In a paradise on the brink of case, a young wolf on a vision quest and an outcast human boy — each with a mission to create a new, ideal world — join hands across their species to face the shadow that once more threatens the world.
Praise for S.P. Somtow
“Riverrun is the finest new series of this 90s so far … here is some of the finest writing the genre has produced.”
“He can create a world with less apparent effort than some writers devote to creating a small room … you owe it to yourself to receive all the resonances he offers you.”
“He may yet give us the greatest science fiction novel of all time.”
“The Shattered Horse is in the true, original sense a work of genius — there is an uncanny spirit in it to be found nowhere else.”
“S. P. Somtow doesn’t write like anyone else!”
“The best Thai writer in the universe!”
“Somtow’s sheer inventiveness, his marvelous use of language, so often turning the vernacular into chilling beauty, his ability to leap across time without losing a beat and those beautiful twists of plot—I can only marvel at it all.“
“Intelligent, energetic, humane, engaging, humorous, delicate and beautiful, this book deserves every bit of the international success that it is bound to receive”
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Flaco
Brazen House Invites Proposals for Book on the Tragic Life of Flaco, the Owl of Central Park Zoo
$20,000 Advance for Selected Manuscript
Brazen House is inviting proposals for a book-length story on Flaco, the owl of Central Park Zoo, who escaped from his cage and, while trying to adopt the “wild” of Manhattan as his new home, died when he crashed into an Upper West Side apartment building. His struggles to find a little corner in the concrete jungle of the world’s most ambitious city have been well documented by a legion of human followers. Many of them have drawn a parallel between their own angst and hopelessness in their pursuit of the American dream and that of Flaco as he tried to find his niche in an alien but promised land. Even in freedom, it seems Flaco saw no hope, for the land to which he had as much right as anyone had been fully claimed by humans.
READ MOREIf Flaco could share his heart and mind, what would he say about his captive life and the brief, unexpected freedom he enjoyed? What resentments did he feel toward humans as he sat inside a small cage as an object of mere curiosity? How forlorn was he in captivity? What did he pine for most, and try to pursue when he soared to freedom? Why did he choose to adopt Manhattan as his home instead of flying away to a faraway forest where he would be with his own kind and safer? What would he say about the NYPD, which is bent on arresting and punishing the human who slashed his cage and set him free? What a hoot! Flaco likely would see the irony: that the land he wanted to belong to—that stood for freedom and opportunity, the essence of the American dream he might have been pursuing—had taken to infighting over acceptance.
Your imaginative submission should include the book proposal (six to ten pages in Word or PDF) and the first two chapters. The proposal should consist of a synopsis and the outline of the story. The book is intended for young adults, but the story and the writing should resonate with older readers as well. And it should make a distinguished contribution to the literature for young readers in enhancing their appreciation of other species with whom we share this Earth. The novel, which will be illustrated with drawings by a selected artist, is envisioned to be around 50,000 words.
The deadline for submission is July 4, 2024. The proposal with the sample chapters must be exclusive to Brazen House. The entry selected for publishing will be announced on September 1, 2024. Brazen House will advance $20,000 to the winning author for the rights to the story in print, electronic, and audible formats. The author will earn a royalty of 20% on sales of printed books and 50% on sales in electronic and audible formats. The deadline for submitting the full manuscript is March 1, 2025.
Please submit your book proposal with the sample chapters and a brief bio to submission@brazenhouseinc.com.
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The Forest Boy
Max Bär
A small wood surrounded by homes and shopping malls and highways is about to disappear into the hands of a developer. It was once a large forest. In the last remaining patch lives a bear named Big Standing Bear. His ancestors fought the tree cutters and perished trying to save their homeland.
Big Standing Bear, wise and practical, realizes there is nothing to be gained now by gallantry; he reluctantly decides to reach out to his human neighbors and plead with them to let him and his family continue to live in their cave like good neighbors. He learns to walk on his hind legs and make other concessions to human manners in a show of accommodation.
READ MOREBut every time he ventures into town to make his plea, he is chased away by gun-toting locals. Despite his upright standing as a bear, he is seen as a fearsome intruder. He will never be accepted as a neighbor. He abandons all hope and resigns to dying like his ancestors—until something spectacular happens: that winter he and his wife, Wilma, give birth to a cub who in every respect looks like a human boy. The parents are elated to know that there is finally an emissary who will be accepted by the humans.
The future of the last remaining patch of the forest now rests on the boy’s shoulders. But he struggles with his own identity—is he a bear-boy or a boy-bear?—as neither the humans nor his own ilk accept him as their own. The boy whose father proudly calls him Max tells the story of his struggles to fulfill his father’s dream.
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Children of Yrth
By S.P. Somtow
Yrth is a place of the far future, where civilizations flourished and decayed each other thousands of years ago. Every disaster that could have happened is long in the past; biological and genetic warfare, environmental catastrophes, wholesale destruction of technologies and the loss of accumulated knowledge. Life is coming back to Yrth, but this times it’s animals who have culture, lore, philosophy and wisdom. Humans, where they exist, are in isolated pockets, hiding in the ruins of what were once great cities. At the edges of the world, it is said that there are creatures of legend, dragons, shapeshifters, angels, perhaps born of the genetic wars which also gave rise to the ascendancy of the animals. In Yrth, it is the wolves who make epic journeys, sing songs, and keep the darkness at bay. A young wolf named Tawn has left the forest in a traditional coming-of-age ritual, seeking a vision in the great wasteland that is the ruins of an ancient city. In the city he encounters a human boy, Arrow, who has been exiled by his superstitious tribe because he is left-handed. The boy knows almost nothing; he communicates with strange noises rather than the language of thoughts and smells; yet there are things he knows. The wasteland is a perilous place. Often it is deadly. That is why the young wolves must go there to find their vision. But it is through his friendship with Arrow that Tawn must discover his true nature, and embark on the search for the Shadow that came into being when the world came back to life, that is planning to send Yrth spiralling downward to darkness once more. To defeat the Shadow, Tawn must journey through the entire devastated continent of Yrth, encountering grave dangers, meeting new friends and terrible enemies, slowly coming to understand how Yrth came to be, on a quest to bring back the world from the brink of a dawning darkness.
Read the evolving epic on “Somtow on Amazon Vella” starting April 1, 2024