Winner of the inaugural Mslexia Novella Award (2019). She used to be someone else, but now she's arrived in Vegas, where she can start again. It won't do to let the past leak in. It's the Sixties now. She's going to become ... Joan. She makes a list: Buy a new dress (fitted, floral). Dye her hair (dark). Curl it. Buy red lipstick. Buy cigarettes and a lighter, too: Joan, she decides, is a smoker. There's no need to dwell on why she's here, what went before. She is just moving forward, one foot in front of the other, becoming that new person. Joan. This city of flashing neon, casinos and shows is full of distractions. Finding a job will be quick and easy. Things to do. New people to meet. A clean sheet. She's certainly not thinking about Jack, or ... No. Not any more. Her new life starts right here, right now.

"A brilliant, deeply unsettling work." Books + Publishing. Jeff is dying. Haunted by memories and grappling with shame, he runs away to a remote part of Scotland with a piece of beta tech that allows him to enter the mind of someone in the past. Instructed to only use it three times, Jeff - self- indulgent, isolated and deteriorating - ignores this advice. In the late 1860s, Leonora lives in the Scottish Highlands, surrounded by nature. Contemplating the social conventions that bind her, her contented life and a secret romantic friendship with the local laird are interrupted when her father sends her to stay with her aunt in Edinburgh. But Leonora's ability to embrace her new life is shadowed by a dark presence that begins to lurk behind her eyes, and strange visions. A Superior Spectre is a novel about curiosity, entitlement and manipulation. It reminds us that the scariest ghosts aren't the ones that go bump in the night, but those that are born and create a place for themselves in the human soul.

In this anthology, our editor, Angela Meyer, pays tribute to the undeniable cultural influence that American TV programs such as Twilight Zone and Outer Limits have had on our lives 'down under'. 'These TV dramas,' Meyer says, ' were often metaphors for equality, justice, the nuclear threat and more. Though they were just as often pure, spooky fun.' Meyer has selected short stories and microfiction which range from the fantastical and macabre to the absurd. In Paddy O'Reilly's Reality TV, a guest is confronted with her husband's infidelity in front of a live audience and Ali Alizedah's Truth and Reconciliation satirizes American celebrity television. Chris Flynn's Sealer's Cove has a nudist caught in a time slip. Carmel Bird evokes Edgar Allan Poe when over-sized hares incite the good folk of rural Victoria to commit criminal acts and in Sticks and Stones, Ryan O'Neill has an academic attacked by a demonic alphabet. Contributors include established and emerging writers such as Marion Halligan, Krissy Kneen as well as new talents. Angela Meyer is a Melbourne-based writer and reviewer. Her fiction has been published in Seizure, Wet Ink, The Lifted Brow. She has written on books for many publications including The Big Issue, The Australian, and Crikey and she has interviewed authors at festivals across Australia and overseas. A chapbook of her flash fiction will be published by Inkerman & Blunt in 2014. Literaryminded.com.au