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In World Fantasy Award winning author S.P. Somtow's second book in the "Club X" series of light novels set in a Thai boarding school full of dark secrets, Kim and his on-again off-again best friend Fluke, gender-bending Polo, psychic Danger and fish-out-of-water Donut, the principal's daughter, cross into alternate universes, battle zombies and eccentric nuns, and enlist the help of their vampire English teacher to solve the mysteries of the universe. A queer take on the standard "kids unearth the dark secrets of their school" trope, the first book has been made into a web TV series which will come out in 2023.

In one volume at last - all of world fantasy award winning author S.P. Somtow's vampire stories - from the sci-fi Vampire of Mallworld to the courtroom drama of Vanilla Blood, to stories about Timmy Valentine, some of which were not incorporated into the three volumes of the Timmy Valentine Trilogy. Includes the International Horror Guild Award winning story Brimstone and Salt, which describes what really might have happened in Gomorrah, the Los Angeles fairy tale The Ugliest Duckling, in which a vampire searches for human connection during the era of AIDS, Red as Jade, a standalone Timmy Valentine story set in the mafia-run jade markets of the Golden Triangle, and many more.

Selected for the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 anthology, this urban contemporary fantasy novella by World Fantasy Award-winning author S.P. Somtow tells the story of Kris, a boy growing up in a Catholic orphanage in the slums of Bangkok, who learns that he is actually the final incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu and must battle the dragon Jade to keep the world green. The first in a series, Another Avatar tells how Kris blunders into discovering his identity after sneaking out to a midnight funeral, catching a god in the act of stealing bananas from the orphanage kitchen, and accidentally fixing the lottery."Somtow is the J.D. Salinger of Siam!" - George Axelrod, screenwriter of Breakfast at Tiffany'sAuthor of over seventy books like Jasmine Nights, Mallworld, and Vampire Junction, composer of a number of widely admired operas such as Dan no Ura, Helena Citrónová, and The Silent Prince, S.P. alternates between his homes in Los Angeles and Bangkok. In 2017, he became the first Asian to be awarded the European Cultural Achievement Award, given by the KulturForum in Berlin to one person each year, a nod to his many accomplishments in music and literature as a bridge between Asian and Western cultures.

After forty years, S.P. Somtow has produced a fifth novel in the Chronicles of the High Inquest, one of the most lauded galactic empire epics of the 1980s. Critically acclaimed yet never previously in print as a complete set, the series has passionate adherents - and they have finally persuaded the author to enrich the universe with more novels. Homeworld of the Heart is the first of a trilogy within a trilogy.The songs of Sajit were known and loved through the million worlds of the Dispersal of Man. He was the favorite of Elloran, most powerful, most compassionate of the godlike Inquestors - even, it was rumored, his lover. In his old age, Ton Elloran visits a backwater planet that purports to contain the tomb of Sajit. A nostalgic visit to his childhood companion birth planet, however, reveals that everything he thought he knew about his closest friend was wrong - and that there were at least two Sajits, their stories bifurcating and melding in an ever more complex skein of memory, desire, and loss. Homeworld of the Heart begins in a small village in a backworld - where a microscopic glitch in Inquestral management has caused two contradictory games of makrúgh to be played out. People bins are raining from the sky, a city is devouring another city, and a goddess must learn to become a whore as cultures and worlds clash.The Inquestor Series is like Game of Thrones - but on a galactic scale. For twenty centuries, the godlike Inquestors have ruled the million worlds of the Dispersal of Man, keeping all its disparate civilizations in precarious balance by playing the star-destroying game of makrúgh.Theodore Sturgeon said "Somtow deals with the greatest magnitude of concept since Stapledon ... I deeply envy anyone who has not read the tale of the Inquestors, for they have before them this transcendent experience."Orson Scott Card said of this series, "he can create a world with less apparent effort than some writers devote to creating a small room ..." and in Homeworld of the Heart Somtow revisits and vastly expands the teeming landscape of the Inquestor series.

It's a daring adventure, a breathtaking leap of ambition, an amazing "gift to the world" from a small country that may seem to some to be far from the world's operatic center.It's a new way to bring to news audiences the most iconic stories of Theravada Buddhism, told and retold for thousands of years, in the language of music, singing, drama, and dance, a language that belongs to every culture in the world - yet the particular dialect of this language is equal parts Asia and Europe.Halfway through this journey, let's take a moment to look at all that has already been achieved.Five linked works of music drama - from the oratorio-like Mahajanaka to the intimate chamber opera The Silent Prince, from the childlike simplicity of The Faithful Son to the convoluted machinations of The Dragon Lord, to the cosmic allegory of Chariot of Heaven.There has been a hiatus for almost two years, but now it's time for final five music dramas to emerge, and 2019 will see premieres of two of them: the short ballet Chandakumar and the magically complex Architect of Dreams. This is a colorful book of photographs from the first five works, including from productions in Bangkok, Houston, Rangsit, Brno, Bayreuth, and Prague.

"Stories within stories within stories! And always, it took another story to explain the one that preceded it." That's the structure of Somtow's richly textured novel of supernatural sacrifice and redemption set during and just after the Civil War. After Abraham Lincoln's assassination, the British widow of the Reverend Grainger (whom she mistakenly believes to have died in the war) attends the New York viewing and there meets Walt Whitman. He has a tale to tell, which involves Civil War atrocities, dark magic and some vivid resurrections. And he's just the first of a series of storytellers (among them Marie Laveau, Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, a voodoo priestess, a one-eyed slave who can raise the dead and a young veteran of Andersonville) who gradually reveal the Rev. Grainger's secret life, and the secrets of undead immortality, to the hitherto sheltered young widow. Author of Vampire Junction and a werewolf novel, Moon Dance, Somtow here deploys zombies and a were-leopard in a story that makes good use of period detail and gory voodoo atmospherics. - Publisher's WeeklyWhat a rich and diverse tapestry is S. P. Somtow's Darker Angels, a dark novel of the Civil War that's told as a phantasmagorical series of stories within stories like concentric rings. There's really no way to do justice to its structure in this brief description, but it must be said that such a potentially intrusive device here causes no confusion and indeed takes nothing away from the desperately grim beauty of the words that make up each and every narration.From the strange beginning, in which the recently widowed Mrs. Paula Grainger meets Walt Whitman while clandestinely visiting the body of the just-slain Abraham Lincoln, to the whirling, wild, wonderful stories of the war later told by Whitman and his young friend, Zachary Brown, and then the stories told by those within the stories ... about the elderly voodoo prince, Old Joseph, who as a free slave raises black Union soldiers from the dead for one last skirmish, and the boy preacher who may have killed his own father, Jimmie Lee Cox, and Tyler Tyler, the young soldier with no arms, and bewitching Phoebe, the voodoo priestess who holds the power to transform herself into a black panther, and finally re(folding) back onto the Reverend Grainger--whose correspondents include Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, and the President himself, and who is not at all quite the way his wife thinks him to be.This is a novel of transformation, of being, of death, and of living the true life that only the grimness of death can bring. It's a novel less about the Civil War than about all wars, but it is quite specifically a Civil War novel, in which the richness of the themes runs like blood spilled between brothers and comrades, masters and slaves. This novel is grotesque, yet it makes such wise statements about the grotesqueness of war and slavery and religion that its own gruesomeness seems not only natural but necessary. Composer and film-maker S. P. Somtow weaves together so many disparate narrative voices yet produces a single cloth of intense beauty and rage, in which inhumanity vies with love as the fiercest of emotions. A novel such as Darker Angels cannot easily be described--it has to be experienced. It's a mystery to me that this great work of literature--yes, literature--will slip between the cracks because of its macabre subject matter. Perhaps too many critical voices need to stop paying attention to labels and focus instead on the heady work beneath this attractive cover. If you missed the first printing, by all means treat yourself to a special order--this trade paperback edition will fit easily on the shelf next to the Poe, Whitman, and Byron to which it so intriguingly refers. A true masterpiece of historical fiction, Darker Angels sings with a grim joy rarely achieved by novelists who dare touch subjects such as these.- Chi Weekly

A pictorial history of Opera Siam's first 18 years - pictures and notes about all sixty productions.

A powerful book about a young boy who goes on a mysterious journey to find the reason for his brother's suicide. Set in the 1980s, before social media and ubiquitous internet, the idea of the dead brother reaching out through computer messages is exotic. The odyssey from Kansas to California and back to the Starry Havens cemetery is emotionally wrenching yet full of humor and irony. One of S.P. Somtow's few young adult novels, this book one the Iowa University's "Outstanding Book of the Year" Award.

An extraordinary tale of a collaboration between a composing prodigy and a Washington politician, the story of how a Thai schoolboy came to create the entire oeuvre of an American composer is fabulous in the true sense of the world ... a modern mythic journey. A true story ... yet one that beggars belief ... with cameo appearances by all sorts of members of the Washington "swamp" ... and the odd science fiction writer dropping in for a chat...."It's a story about the human need to want to break boundaries and exceed limitations. It's about dreams and aspirations, and in the end we need to ask questions about the very nature of art and about why we as humans need art in our lives."It is also the story of two people from vastly divergent cultures, two people who both, perhaps, felt alienated from the people and situations that surrounded them, and who came to share a strangely intimate bond."A never-before-told secret history, this memoir by the first Asian to be awarded the European Cultural Achievement Award is an eye-opener. ***"Once upon a time, almost half a century ago," this diary begins, "I was a college student in an elevator at an exclusive club in Washington, DC. The elevator was filled with important people - admirals and such - and I was trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, considering I was a long-haired Asian attired in quasi-hippie garb. As the elevator descended, they began discussing the Secretary of the Navy, one J. William Middendorf, the Second."One of the Very Impressive Persons said, "What do you think of Middendorf's music?"Another snickered, "Yeah, yeah, his so-called music.""I heard a rumor," said the first, "that it's all actually composed by some young oriental guy."***Thus begins the wild story of the bizarre collaboration between a powerful American politician and a long-haired 17-year-old Thai music student that produced seven symphonies, an opera, dozens of concertos, rhapsodies, ballets, and occasional pieces, and over a hundred marches in just over a decade. In a wryly ironic voice, S.P. Somtow, who composed and conducts opera under his given name Somtow Sucharitkul, spins a tale that is like a symphonic version of "Forrest Gump" - only it's true. This is a memoir with cameo appearances by the Queen of Holland, Isaac Asimov, the Grateful Dead, Oliver North, and the Governor of Bangkok. All-night orgies of playing C major scales, evenings of eating corned beef hash under a real Rembrandt in an ambassador's living room, taking notes on the Secretary of the Navy's humming while top brass waited for their marching orders, dashing off marches while wolfing down American sitcoms ... fifty years later, it's time now for this story to emerge.S.P. Somtow says of the autobiographical fragment: " It was the union of Mantovani with Schoenberg, and it should have been a marriage made in hell, but somehow, it came off."I started to write this book because I am afraid that one day someone will take the bones of this story and add to it a different kind of flesh. It could easily be made into a hatchet job, but that would be missing the whole point of it all."

Set against a brilliant panorama of European expansion into the West in the late 1800s, Moon Dance is the horrifying tale of the illegitimate son of the Count von Bachl-Wolfling, leader of a pack of Viennese werewolves, and of the boy's all-too-human governess, Speranza. The pack has decided to emigrate to America, in search of wild lands and unsuspicious human prey. But unbeknownst to them, the Dakota territory is already home to the Shungmanitu--a clan of the Lakota Sioux who become wolves by the light of the full moon.

S.P. Somtow's novel The Stone Buddha's Tears was inspired by a real-life incident in 1991 in which the city of Bangkok, about to host an international conference, decided to throw up a corrugated iron fence around a slum in order to conceal it from the passing delegates. In this fantasy novel of innocence and hope, the lives of two boys from opposite ends of the social spectrum intersect because of the wall. The protagonist, a beggar known only as "Boy", meets a novice monk whose father, a corrupt politician, has sent him to a monastery in order to provide a picture-perfect photo-op for his election campaign. Between them the two boys concoct a team of street kids, tazi drivers and elephant herders in a wild plan to bring down the adult world's dark alliance between organized crime and politics. The Stone Buddha's Tears is a powerful story about friendship, class and society, and the power of children of speak the truth in a world in which adults have forgotten how.