We are super excited to share our 2021 book schedule! We’ve got such a great lineup ranging from a prose-poetry speculative collection by Eugen Bacon and Dominique Hecq, a literary-leaning speculative fiction collection by Keith Rosson, a dark fantasy novel by J.S. Breukelaar, the next entry in Seb Doubinsky’s addictive City-States Cycle, a dark fantasy/horror novella by J. Ashley-Smith, and the final book in G.D. Penman’s Witch of Empire LGBT urban fantasy series.

We’ll be sharing more on each of these in the months to come and encourage you to check them out and preorder your copy today!

2021 Releases

Speculate: A Collection of Microlit

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Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons

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The Bridge

The Last Days of Hong Kong

Paperclip

Ariadne, I Love You

Publishers Weekly weighs in on Keith Rosson’s debut story collection, Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons, with a wonderful starred review! The collection releases in February 2021 but is available now for preorder.

With this excellent collection of 15 jagged, fragmented pieces, dark fantasist Rosson subverts expectations and challenges his characters and his readers alike to second-guess their preconceptions. Evil is just as likely to spring from daily life as to lunge out of the supernatural in these disquieting tales.

Publishers weekly (★ review)

Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons

Author: Keith Rosson
Genres: Literary Fiction, Magical Realism, Speculative Fiction, Story Collection
Tags: 2021 Releases, allbooks, Coming Soon, Meerkat Press, Speculative Fiction

With Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons, award-winning author Keith Rosson delves into notions of family, grief, identity, indebtedness, loss, and hope, with the surefooted merging of literary fiction and magical realism he’s explored in previous novels. In “Dunsmuir,” a newly sober husband buys a hearse to help his wife spread her sister’s ashes, while “The Lesser Horsemen” illustrates what happens when God instructs the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to go on a team-building cruise as a way of boosting their frayed morale. In “Brad Benske and the Hand of Light,” an estranged husband seeks his wife’s whereabouts through a fortuneteller after she absconds with a cult, and in “High Tide,” a grieving man ruminates on his brother’s life as a monster terrorizes their coastal town. With grace, imagination, and a brazen gallows humor, Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons merges the fantastic and the everyday, and includes a number of Rosson’s unpublished stories, as well as award-winning favorites.

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Meerkat Press Bookstore

We are excited to announce that Meerkat Press will be publishing Steve Simpson’s two volume collection THE PURPOSE OF REALITY in 2022: LUNAR, a collection of poetry, and SOLAR, a collection of short stories. Both books will also include Steve’s unique artworks. We were first introduced to Steve’s talent when his story, “Jacinta’s Lovers,” appeared in our first anthology, LOVE HURTS, and we’re so happy to continue the relationship with this acquisition.

The Purpose of Reality (Lunar)

A poetry collection. Here is a selection of the beings within:

The detective, who carelessly morphs into birds and insects, and cannot choose between brooding and moping, until a stylish greyscale client with retrolescent highlights appears.

The Kraken, who takes the opportunity to do some shopping when a container ship is lost at sea.

Proteus, Homo Sapiens Beta, who discovered fire and put it out, who created a rudimentary encyclopedia that he pedaled across Gondwanaland on weekends.

Millie, the intrepid librarian, unperturbed by the Dark Solarian or the fearsome kilowasp, who insists that her underlings pay for bibliotactical losses.

The adorable Deija Thoris, Martian Princess of Glass, whose fans line the streets waving Windex spray. Wollongong will never be the same, because her armies have razed it to the ground. “No-one will miss it,” she reassured an infatuated follower.

The Purpose of Reality (Solar)

A story collection. Here is a selection of the beings within:

Timid sparrow Wilda was mined for the almadoreine in her brain by the friendly Onsarians, aliens who brought so many benefits to São Paulo. “Almadoreine serves no purpose,” the mayor said. But Mekô, the jaguar god, had set her dreams on fire, and now her nails needed trimming, quite often.

At Claire’s school, the walls were cardboard, and her chain-smoking math teacher never allowed numbers to be mentioned. He used a drawing of a press to flatten slices of air into tissue paper for kites, and he was Claire’s favorite, because all the other teachers were ghosts. One day, with a little pasta and a little mambo, everything changed.

The negentropy wars didn’t end the world, there were survivors, and in Santarém, the gringo electrician needed medicine to save his daughter’s life. To get it, he had to cross the Amazon River, where the Negentropy Horizon divided Brazil. The locals believed you could look across the river and see directly into hell. The electrician wasn’t superstitious, but he decided netting was a good idea, to keep the insects off.

Aldona worked in the Damasco Auto scrapyard, and when the electromagnet on the crane burned out and dropped the blue Passat, no-one saw the electric-winged shape that had been trapped by the magnet. After all, there was nothing to be concerned about: the alien space fleet had been driven away by the earth’s nuclear defenses.

Steve Simpson lives in Sydney, and he’s never been able to work out exactly what he does, although he would probably feed the cat if he had one. In 2013, he won a Canadian writing contest, and since then, his poetry and short stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies. In the visual arts, works created with his image evolution software have been shown at several exhibitions, and he recently developed a unique system for generating art from mental states via EEG (brainwaves). In the sciences, he’s published over 200 research papers, most recently in clinical neurology. Awards include the Peter Doherty Innovation Prize, for WeldPrint™, technology to make vehicles safer.