On Friday, Locus published their annual, stunningly comprehensive Recommending Reading List for 2012's speculative fiction and, pleasingly, five SH stories were included:

• "The Keats Variation" by KM Ferebee
• "The Grinnell Method" by Molly Gloss
• "Things Greater Than Love" by Kate Bachus
• "Beside Calais" by Samantha Henderson
• "Over the Waves" by Louise Hughes

Congratulations to all five of the above authors from all of us here. Karen Burnham has also compiled a list of all the recommended short fiction available online, so you've got plenty of good reading ahead of you. Congratulations also to Brit, whose essay We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-Telling and anthology Beyond Binary both made the list.

A couple of general thoughts about this year's list: I think it accurately suggests that it was a pretty stunning year for collections, and a very decent year for first novels; but the Best SF Novel and Best Fantasy Novel lists are both a bit too generous with their inclusions for my taste, and I wish they had a bit more academic input into their best non-fiction list. It doesn't look like the best of years for novellas, so I'll be interested to see what turns up on awards ballots in that category. A few things I'm particularly pleased to see: the Singh/Menon anthology Breaking the Bow, which I haven't quite finished yet, but is in general very strong; Kiini Ibura Salaam's Ancient, Ancient, which would certainly have been on my best-of-year list if I'd finished it in time; and Roz Kaveney's Rituals, ditto.