The last three years have been tough going for fans of label-defying British fantasist China Miéville. After cementing his reputation (and a new subgenre) with his ochre-soaked Bas Lag trilogy, he spoiled his fans by ripping through six books in eight years, including one every year from 2009 to 2012. Since then…nothing.

Unless, that is, you’ve followed his remarkable short fiction career, including stories published in The Guardian and McSweeney’s. His next book is, in fact, a short story collection, and a massive one at that, pulling together 10 previously published stories and 18 new ones, and we’re thrilled to offer an exclusive look at elegant, understated, quite literary cover, as well as the complete table of contents. You find both after the blurb…

The fiction of multiple award–winning author China Miéville is powered by intelligence and imagination. Like George Saunders, Karen Russell, and David Mitchell, he pulls from a variety of genres with equal facility, employing the fantastic not to escape from reality but instead to interrogate it in provocative, unexpected ways. London awakes one morning to find itself besieged by a sky full of floating icebergs. Destroyed oil rigs, mysteriously reborn, clamber from the sea and onto the land, driven by an obscure but violent purpose. An anatomy student cuts open a cadaver to discover impossibly intricate designs carved into a corpse’s bones—designs clearly present from birth, bearing mute testimony to…what? Of such concepts and unforgettable images are made the twenty-eight stories in this collection—many published here for the first time. By turns speculative, satirical, and heart-wrenching, fresh in form and language, and featuring a cast of damaged yet hopeful seekers who come face-to-face with the deep weirdness of the world—and at times the deeper weirdness of themselves—Three Moments of an Explosion is a fitting showcase for one of our most original voices.



And here is the complete list of stories (those marked are original to this collection):

“Three Moments of an Explosion”

“Polynia”

“The Condition of New Death”*

“The Dowager of Bees”*

“In the Slopes”*

“The Crawl”

“Watching God”*

“The 9th Technique”

“The Rope Is the World”

“The Buzzard’s Egg”*

“Säcken”

“Syllabus”*

“Dreaded Outcome”*

“After the Festival”*

“The Dusty Hat”*

“Escapee”*

“The Bastard Prompt”*

“Rules”*

“Estate”

“Keep”*

“A Second Slice Manifesto”*

“Covehithe”

“The Junket”*

“Four Final Orpheuses”

“The Rabbet”*

“Listen the Birds”*

“A Mount”*

“The Design”

Pre-order Three Moments of an Explosion, out August 4.