On this St. George’s Day in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Fifteen (and, probably, William Shakespeare’s birthday), Abaddon Books is delighted to announce Monstrous Little Voices: Five New Tales From Shakespeare’s World of Fantasy, a new anthology of fantasy fiction honouring the greatest storyteller in the English canon, to be published a year from now on 23rd April 2016, the four-hundredth anniversary of his death.
Forget Arthur Conan Doyle and J. K. Rowling. Stuff the Brontë sisters and Ian Fleming. Ask someone to name the first British writer that comes to mind – the most influential, the most important to our national identity – and Will Shakespeare’ll come up four times out of five. Prolific, educated and populist, the Bard of Avon gave us bloody revenges and bumbling nurses that had the groundlings howling, and breathtaking poetry and sparkling wit that are still dissected and debated four centuries on. His legacy shapes our very language: he’s the reason we have forgone conclusions, household words, night owls and salad days.
Unquestionably, Shakespeare’s world is one of fantasy. Whether it’s overtly fantastic, as in the wizard Prospero in The Tempest or the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or subtler in its overtones, as in Friar Lawrence’s potions in Romeo and Juliet or the malign prophecies of the witches in MacBeth, the otherworldly hangs over Shakespeare’s heroes. Monstrous Little Voices will return to that world, telling new stories in and around the Bard’s works, from five incredible authors.
Asked about the project editor David Thomas Moore said, “Who loves the English tongue that loves not Will?/ Who writeth works of fancy that can say/ They ne’er turned to the Bard for writing’s muse/ Nor called on terms that Stratford’s Bard did say?/ Not I.” Then he stopped trying to write in iambic pentameter and added, “I more or less grew up in the theatre, and have always loved Shakespeare, both his writing and the gently magical world he wrote in – and, for all we know, believed he lived in. This is a tremendously exciting project.”
Monstrous Little Voices will be Abaddon Books second collection in our Abaddon Classics series, which launched last year with the popular Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets anthology collection, which saw Holmes and Watson reimagined across time and space by a diverse group of bestselling and up-and-coming talents.
It is therefore with extra delight that we can confirm that we will be welcoming back two of the talents from Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets in the form of acclaimed fantasy author Adrian Tchaikovsky and Hugo fancast nominee Emma Newman! We’ll be revealing the final three authors in the coming months, but Abaddon fans can rest assured that we’ll be continuing our commitment to bringing you surprising new genre talent and established favourites…
Monstrous Little Voices: Five New Tales From Shakespeare’s World of Fantasy will publish in physical edition April 16th 2016, alongside DRM-free eBooks of the collection and individual stories.