May was full of stories. Great stories, wonderful stories, frightening stories, EXCELLENT stories. So. many. stories. I share ten of them here, and there’s another ten for your reading pleasure at B&N:

• Read my short fiction roundup for May at Barnes & Noble’s SciFi & Fantasy Blog

Faint Voices, Increasingly Desperate, by Johanna DeNiro in Shimmer
This rich, devastating tale is so good it sort of gives me vertigo to read it. DeNiro vividly reimagines Freia and Odin, the world tree, life and death (silk worms!), AND gives you Freia living in Vienna, blood magic, and a shattering love story. This Freia is such a fantastic character – awesome and hot-blooded, vulnerable and powerful. It’s a story that took me completely by surprise from beginning to end, and I love that.

What You Pass For, by Melanie West in F&SF
With an old fence-painting brush, white fence paint…

There has been a lot of discussion lately about female to male ratios within anthologies, and a lack of female presence and diversity in general. Lisa Morton, president of the Horror Writers Association, recently recapped a study from 2010 of Women in the Horror Small Press, which is around the time Written Backwards first started publishing anthologies. This got me thinking about my own projects over the years, so I put all the data I have into a spreadsheet.

My goal with these anthologies has always been to find new voices (the reason I started the press in the first place) and to place them alongside legends, no matter the individual. For the last five years, however, I have consciously widened my scope, reaching out to more diverse writers from all genres, hopefully to bring you some amazing books along the way.

Anyway, I encourage all small presses to…