The Readers’ Guide
What’s in Issue 1108
| News | This is the last regular issue of the year’s third quarter: astronomical northern summer and southern winter. Next week, we’ll bring you the Editors’ Choices in the Third Quarterly Review. Regular publication is scheduled to continue with issue 1109 on September 29, 2025. |
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| Short Stories |
New contributor Allen Cash introduces a young guitarist who is fascinated by his discovery of an ornate instrument. The thing is haunted, and he might best take the seller’s advice literally and not in its commonplace sense: Don’t Fret, part 1; conclusion. The province of Ontario has numerous towns and cities named for counterparts in Europe. A moribund priest seems to visit both Old and New World cities in a final, symbolic road trip. Paul G. Chamberlain, An Episode of Motorcycle Madness New contributor Francis Gene Collins brings a job applicant to a police department. He’s asked to solve a mystery involving the chief’s family, namely The Case of Peanut Noyer, part 1; conclusion. New contributor Ashley Gao depicts a future AI specialist and a marketeer debating the meaning that scholarship and art might give to anthropological study of the dawn age in The Mother of Gaia, part 1; conclusion. New contributor Fiona Sinclair portrays a mother and daughter who are widows and who seem to have a mystical experience in common: Double Exposure, part 1; conclusion. |
| Flash Fiction |
Many citizens of the 21st-century USA are bedeviled by cultural conflicts inherited from earlier centuries, but two college students, George and Delilah, set a good example by being open-minded by personal experience or natural curiosity. Gary Clifton, Then Short Body Got Shot |
| Poetry |
Bill Bowler, Woke Up This Morning New contributor Terry Trowbridge, Anatomy of the Lemon: Carpel Section |
Departments
| Welcome | Bewildering Stories introduces and welcomes Ashley Gao, Fiona Sinclair and Terry Trowbridge. |
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| Challenge | Challenge 1108 finds that sometimes the answers to questions can be found in A Good Book. |
| The Reading Room |
Nenad Pavlović, Salvation on Peril Island excerpt |
| Letters | Don Webb, Appreciations |
| The Art Gallery |
Richard Ong, The Light Fantastic Channie Greenberg, Jamboree A randomly rotating selection of Bewildering Stories’ art NASA: Picture of the Day Sky and Telescope, This Week’s Sky at a Glance |
Randomly selected Bewildering motto:
Randomly selected classic rejection notice:
Bewildering Stories’ official mottoes:
“Poems are not made with ideas; they are made with words.” — Stéphane Mallarmé
Ars longa, vita brevis. Rough translation: “Proofreading never ends.”
To Bewildering Stories’ schedule: In Times to Come
Readers’ reactions are always welcome.
Please write!
