BCS #229 is out today, featuring an insightful story, a unique novella, and a five-hour podcast in celebration of the 200th episode of the BCS Audio Fiction Podcast!

Rose Lemberg (“The Book of How to Live” in BCS #209, “Geometries of Belonging” in BCS #183, “Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds” in BCS #175, “Held Close in Syllables of Light” in BCS #80) returns to BCS with a full-length novella set in the same Birdverse world of their other BCS stories. “A Portrait of the Desert in Personages of Power, Pt. I” is in BCS #229, to be concluded by Pt. II in BCS #230 in two weeks. (Both parts/both issues are available now as ebooks.)

Theodore McCombs offers “Ora et Labora,” a tale of a young protagonist struggling with life in a monastery of magic and mathematics.

The BCS Audio Fiction Podcast episode is BCS 200: A Portrait of the Desert in Personages of Power, a special five-hour reading of the entire Rose Lemberg novella. It’s guest narrated by podcast and audiobook narrator, writer and poet C.S.E. Cooney.

From the Archives with BCS #229 is “Boat in Shadows, Crossing” by Tori Truslow, from BCS #113 and podcast BCS 100, a finalist for the Parsec Awards. It’s similarly lyrical and relationship-focused as “A Portrait of the Desert in Personages of Power.”

All behind a new crop of our cover art for early summer for our Northern Hemisphere readers: “Monument” by Jeff Brown.