Michael Chabon's McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales is out in the shops as well. I'm less happy with "Closing Time", which is a ghost story, perhaps, about childhood. It's not a bad story, but it does, on rereading, feel more like a preliminary sketch for something, rather than the thing itself.
Peter Straub tells me that they may be selling Conjunctions 39 as a mass-market anthology, and will I hope call it something other than "the New Wave Fabulists" (I've seen some spectacularly dim reviews of Conjunctions 39, most of which seemed to begin from the assumption that Peter Straub had phoned us up to say "We, the New Wave Fabulists, a hitherto unnoticed movement, in a pitiful bid for respectability, are assembling an anthology and I need your most representative/unrepresentative/mainstream/slipstream story," rather than "Hi, it's Peter, I'm editing an anthology. The pay is pitiful, I'm afraid, but I've got some good people in there. I'll need a story in May if you've got one," which is how it actually happened.) I expect that by the time Conjunctions 39 comes out in mass market, "October in the Chair" will have been collected in the Steve Jones Year's Best Horror, and the David Hartwell Year's Best Fantasy.
The best story I wrote last year was the Sherlock Holmes meets the Cthulhu mythos one, "A Study In Emerald", for the Shadows Over Baker Street anthology, a story that is, I suspect, as good as anything I've ever written. That'll be out in September.
(There's meant to be a sort of theme to the next short story collection of extremely unreliable narrators telling you their stories.)