There was no Instagram 10 years ago when we gathered in New York City for the 2007 Nebula Awards weekend—but if it had existed, the festivities might have looked something like this.

Hanging out with John Kessel

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The Living Dead—a reprint anthology consisting of more than 230,000 words of zombie fiction, including my Stoker finalist “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man”—has just been published.

To promote the book, John Joseph Adams has launched a Web site coinciding with the release. Go there to find complete text of the introduction and four of the anthology’s 34 stories, plus excerpts of several of the other stories.

You can read the opening of my story there, which represents its first U.S. publication, as it originally appeared last year in Pete Crowther’s UK-based magazine Postscripts.

But I’d also like to point you toward one of my all-time favorite stories by another, Adam-Troy Castro’s “Dead Like Me,” which is available online in its entirety.

I first read that story in Castro’s collection A Desperate Decaying Darkness, and I’ve probably read it at least a dozen times since. It’s a powerful and moving tale, and if you’ve never read it, you should go and do so now.

After which you should buy the entire book, of course!

John Joseph Adams has just posted the final cover to his zombie-themed anthology The Living Dead, which will reprint my Stoker-nominated novella “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man.”

As you’ll note, this is yet another cover on which I appear under my famous pseudonym “many others.” This time, I am share that pen name with such writers as Dan Simmons, Michael Swanwick, Jeffrey Ford, Douglas E. Winter, Joe Lansdale, Adam-Troy Castro, Andy Duncan, Harlan Ellison, and Robert Silverberg. Not too shabby!

John Joseph Adams, editor of the recent post-apocalyptic anthology Wastelands, which has been receiving rave reviews, informed me late last night that he’ll be reprinting my “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” in his upcoming zombie anthology from Night Shade Books. The book, tentatively titled No More Room in Hell, will be published in October. Good news with which to start off 2008!

And for those of you who wanted to nominate the story for a Nebula Award last month, but couldn’t because the story’s original venue was a UK magazine, mark your calendars, because its eligibility period will begin in October with this first U.S. publication.