I don't know about you, but July just whipped past for me, and August is likely to go nearly as fast. Just before we get there, though, here's our monthly round-up of SH contributor news, starting with a congratulations to various Parsec Awards nominees, including AC Wise's "Final Girl Theory", Tori Truslow's "Boat in Shadows, Crossing" (discussed earlier this year in our short fiction snapshot), and Tina Connolly's Toasted Cake.

We then pause for a special shout-out to the new online incarnation of Mythic Delirium, with Marie Brennan's "The Wives of Paris and Sonya Taaffe's "Cuneiform Toast" already live, and work by Alexandra Seidel, C.S.E. Cooney, Ken Liu and Amal El-Mohtar and others to come over the next couple of months. Also launching soon: Lakeside Circus, a new venue for flash, short fiction and poetry edited by Carrie Cuinn, Andrew Kelly and Alexa Seidel.

Now, on to poetry. AJ Odasso's "Terce(t)" is in the latest Inkscrawl, along with Sonya Taaffe's "Deinde Centum" (Sonya also has a couple of poems in the latest Cascadia Subduction Zone), Michele Bannister's "?tautahi in Spring", and others. Sally Rosen Kindred has released Darling Hands, Darling Tongue, a chapbook of poetry inspired by Peter Pan, via Hyacinth Girl Press. The September Asimov's includes David C. Kopaska-Merkel's "Archive Copy", and further poems by Alicia Cole and Megan Arkenberg (and a story by Benjamin Crowell, among others). Virginia M. Mohlere's "It Is Now After" appears in Dark Mountain 4. Elizabeth Barrette's July fishbowl theme was "unlikely heroes and implausible villains"; next up is "nomads", on Tuesday 6 August. And last but not least, Jenny Blackford's cat poem "Roughly spherical, and covered in dead leaves" appears in the latest issue of the Australian literary journal Westerly.

Moving to books: Phoebe North's debut novel, the generation starship tale Starglass, is out from Simon & Schuster. This is How You Die, the second Machine of Death anthology (see Hannah Strom-Martin's review of volume one here, and a review of the present volume at the AV Club) includes stories by Ada Hoffmann ("Blue Fever", free preview here), Liz Argall ("Blunt Force Trauma Delivered by Spouse"), M. Bennardo ("Lake Titicaca") and many others. Jacqueline West's middle-grade fantasy series The Books of Elsewhere continues with volume four, The Strangers. Mike Allen's Clockwork Phoenix 4 includes stories by Marie Brennan, Nicole Kornher-Stace and Kenneth Schneyer among others, and was reviewed in these pages by Lila Garrott. Missing Links, ed. L. Timmel Duchamp, is fresh out from Aqueduct Press and includes work by Kristin King, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Mari Ness, Nisi Shawl, and others. Joel Best has released a collection of flash stories, Timeline, via Amazon. Michael R. Underwood's second novel, Celebromancy, a showbiz urban fantasy, is out from Pocket Star, and Book View Cafe released Marie Brennan's Deeds of Men, an Onyx Court novella. Wendy Rathbone's science fiction novel Pale Zenith is out from Eye Scry. Prospective released After the Fall, Angels are Kind of Dicks, which includes James S. Dorr's flash "The Left Behinds", among others. Last but certainly not least, in coming soon! news, Ken Liu's translation of The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin -- which may be the first novel-length work of Chinese genre sf to be translated into English -- will be coming out from Tor in the US.

On the stories front, if you enjoyed Sarah Pinsker's "In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind" this month, check out "Join Our Team of Time Travel Professionals at Daily Science Fiction. (Also at Daily SF this month: "Breaking Orbit" by Rachael Acks.) Alan DeNiro has released a "game-novella" titled "We Are the Firewall", set in a dystopian near-future Minneapolis. Carmen Maria Machado's flash "Miss Laura’s School for Esquire Men" appeared at Tin House's Open Bar. The July Clarkesworld includes Sunny Moraine's "I Tell Thee All, I Can No More." Ann K. Schwader's Lovecraftian tale "Her Beloved Son" is in Fungi 21. OJ Cade has a science fiction story, "The Mistress of Fishes" in Regeneration: New Zealand Speculative Fiction II; Aliya Whiteley's "Rock Song" appears in Kaleidotrope; John Zaharick's "After the Kaiju Attack" can be found at Stupefying Stories Showcase. Swill Magazine 7 includes Lisa Nohealani Morton's "Till She Fill My Mouth With Laughing"; you can read an excerpt here. Tina Connolly's "Old Dead Futures" is at Tor.com, and Claire Humphrey's "The God Seed" is at Crossed Genres. And sneaking in under the wire (technically an August release, but already available) Ross Lockhart's Tales of Jack the Ripper anthology includes Orrin Grey's story "Ripperology" and other work by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Ann K. Schwader.

Last but not least, non-fiction. Genevieve Valentine has been writing about Graceland for the AV Club, and her own private B-movie at Clarkesworld. Matthew Cheney posted some out-takes from his review for us of Empty Space by M. John Harrison. At the LA Review of Books, John Clute tackles Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane while Nick Hubble reports on Christopher Priest's The Adjacent. Maureen Kincaid Speller writes about Adrian Barnes Nod and 'Speaking Trope' at Paper Knife. Aishwarya Subramanian considers Karen Lord's The Best of All Possible Worlds. And Adam Roberts looked at M. Suddain's Theatre of the Gods for Arc, then took on the (unenviable, apparently) task of reading Susan Greenfield's 2121 for The Guardian.