Another product page for Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful edited by Paula Guran including the contents…

A bewitching brew of stories sure to enchant.

Surrounded by the aura of magic, witches have captured our imaginations for millennia and fascinate us now more than ever. No longer confined to the image of a hexing old crone, witches can be kindly healers and protectors, tough modern urban heroines, holders of forbidden knowledge, sweetly domestic spellcasters, darkly domineering, sexy enchantresses, ancient sorceresses, modern Wiccans, empowered or persecuted, possessors of supernatural abilities that can be used for good or evil—or perhaps only perceived as such. Welcome to the world of witchery in many guises: wicked, wild, and wonderful. Includes two original, never-published stories.

Content (alphabetically by author):
“The Cold Blacksmith” by Elizabeth Bear
“The Ground Whereon She Stands” by Lean Bobet
“The Witch’s Headstone” by Neil Gaiman
“Lessons with Miss Gray” by Theodora Goss
“The Only Way to Fly” by Nancy Holder
“Basement Magic” by Ellen Klages
“Nightside” by Mercedes Lackey
“April in Paris” by Ursula K. Le Guin
“The Goosle” by Margo Lanagan
“Mirage and Magia” by Tanith Lee
“Poor Little Saturday” by Madeleine L’Engle
“Catskin” by Kelly Link
“Bloodlines” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
“The Way Wind” by Andre Norton
“Skin Deep” by Richard Parks
“Ill Met in Ulthar” by T.A. Pratt (original)
“Marlboros & Magic” by Linda Robertson (original)
“Walpurgis Afternoon” by Delia Sherman
“The World Is Cruel, My Daughter” by Cory Skerry
“The Robbery” by Cynthia Ward
“Afterward” by Don Webb
“Magic Carpets” by Leslie What
“Boris Chernevsky’s Hands” by Jane Yolen

A product page has been added for Robots: The Recent AI, edited by Sean Wallace, our February release.

From Karel Čapek’s biotech machines of R.U.R….to Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore’s “The Proud Robot”…to Isaac Asimov’s positronic robots…to the many stories, films, cartoons, and games that have come since featuring cybertronic sex toys, robotic rebels, grandmothers with artificial intelligence, automatons, bots, droids, and so many other variations—these machines have represented our dreams as well as our anxieties. We love these literary creations but fear them as well. Stories from the last decade by top science fiction authors representing the many facets of robots in the twenty-first century: beautiful, hideous, and everything in between. (We’ll have a complete content list soon!)

We’ll be publishing the BIGGEST book in the history of Prime Books in April: A Song Called Youth: Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, Eclipse Corona — all three of the classic, pioneering cyberpunk novels by John Shirley — unabridged — in one giant omnibus.

We are estimating it at 768 pages and I forget the trim size, but larger than 6″X9″. The author is revising the novels, so this will be *the* edition. We’ll also have them in ebook-format for the first time ever.

No cover yet, but we promise it will look nothing like this cover to the right — no guys with mullets!

According to CNNMoney–which is actually quoting Spirit Halloween, the country’s largest seasonal Halloween retailer–Charlie Sheen is the most popular choice for a costume this season. Spirit President and CEO Steven Silverstein cited Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Snooki (or any member of the gang from the “Jersey Shore” cast) as top choices for women. For kids? The mobile phone app Angry Birds.

But the National Retail Federation begs to disagree. They say zombies are hot for Halloween and “traditional costumes” still rank as consumer favorites. Witches (13.4%) will be the top choice for adults while pirates (3.9%) and vampires (3.7%) Batman (2.2%), cats (2.2%) and vixens (2.1%) will also be popular with adults this year. For the kids, princesses (11%) continue their seven-year reign as the top children’s costume while other top choices for kids include Spiderman (3.1%), Batman (2.4%) and Superman (1.3%). Additionally, fairies (2.6%), Disney princesses (2.2%) and vampires (2.4%) made the top 10 for children. The most popular pet costume will be a pumpkin (10.7%), with devils (8.1%) and hot dogs (6.0%) following closely behind. Some pet owners also plan to dress their pet up like a cat (3.7%) or a dog (2.0%). (Personally, my cats will be cleverly disguised as cats.)

Also, according to NRF’s 2011 Halloween Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey conducted by BIGresearch, seven in 10 Americans (68.6%) plan to celebrate Halloween, up from 63.8 percent last year and the most in theor survey’s nine-year survey history. The average person will spend $72.31 on decorations, costumes and candy, up from $66.28 last year. Total Halloween spending is expected to reach $6.86 billion. More people plan to dress in costume (43.9% vs. 40.1% in 2010), throw or attend a party (34.3% vs. 33.3% last year) and visit a haunted house (22.9% vs. 20.8%) than in 2010. Additionally, 49.5% will decorate their home/yard and 14.7 percent will dress their pets in costume. Other traditional celebratory activities include handing out candy (73.5%), carving a pumpkin (47.8%) and taking children trick-or-treating (32.9%).

But if you want to invest your Halloween dollars wisely, we recommend a nice fat anthology! Preferably one of ours:Halloween,Creatures, Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Beware the Night, Vampires: The Recent Undead, Zombies: The Recent Dead, and Running With the Pack would be much more entertaining than dressing up as Charlie Sheen.

One of the most common Halloween party activities is bobbing for apples. Other than apples being abundant in many areas for Halloween, there are the physics of the thing: Apples contain a relatively large amount of air and, since the skin is waxy, the air does not escape rapidly so they readily float. And, unless you cheat and go for the stem, their size and round shape make them fairly difficult to bite when bobbing about in the water.

Depending on the era, there might be more to it than just winning a game. At the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th, Halloween parties were full of fortune telling (often connected to predicting one’s true love or who one was to marry or when) the first to get an apple would supposedly be the first to marry.

But that connection had disappeared by the time I was bobbing for apples.

So, as cute as this vintage card is…

I hated bobbing for apples when I was a kid. If you were wearing Halloween makeup, it would usually be destroyed. At the very least your costume and/or hair got soaked. And, okay, I WORE GLASSES. So I could either take them off and be blind or keep them on and risk my specs falling into the water or having them jostled off my face to the floor. Not that the water would harm my spectacles, but falling or getting them knocked off part might…ohmigawd…break them.

Hey, my eyes were bad. Every six month for years (starting at age six) I got progressively thicker lenses. And there weren’t any “lightweight” or “shatterproof” alternatives. They were expensive and ugly. I spent a great deal of my childhood being afraid of breaking my glasses. Hated wearing them, yes, but better than being blind…

Plus—fer real—putting your face into a tub of cold water with no more reward than a plain old apple? Ick. And I bet boys spit in the water or, or, licked the apples and got cooties on them. Ick-ick!

Well, fright is a part of Halloween. Eventually I realized sharing spit with boys wasn’t so bad. But I was past apple-bobbing by the time I got contact lenses.

I still have my doubts about apple bobbing. If you have any doubts about the insidiousness of this so-called game, read Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party, in which a girl is drowned in an apple-bobbing tub.