Book of Forthcoming Tribute Stories

I have just put together a collection of 'tribute' stories to a handful of authors I admire. I have written many such stories over the years; I have gathered together 20 of them into one volume that will be called The Senile Pagodas.

This title is taken from an imaginary book in one of the 'H. Bustos Domecq' stories that were co-authored by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares in the 1940s and which were in themselves tributes to the detective fiction writers they both so admired.

A senile person tends to be indifferent to the present and prefers to live in the past; my tribute stories are directly inspired by authors from the past (though there are one or two contemporary names among the others); a pagoda is one of the most elegant structures ever devised by mankind. Therefore the title seems triply apt!

Here is a complete list of the authors who inspired a tribute story in this book:

* Franz Kafka
* Edgar Allan Poe
* H.P. Lovecraft
* Donald Barthelme
* Clark Ashton Smith
* Gustav Meyrink
* Lord Dunsany
* Bruno Schulz
* Jorge Luis Borges
* Maurice Richardson
* Frederic Brown
* Stanislaw Lem
* John Sladek
* Michael Moorcock
* Philip Jose Farmer
* Michael Bishop
* Italo Calvino
* William Hope Hodgson
* Mikhail Bulgakov
* Robert E. Howard

With luck the book will be out in early 2013.