City of Roses
A serialized phantastick on the ten thousand things & the one true only.

also available at the following fine establishments:

Powell’s City of Books • Bookshop.org • Smashwords • itch.io • Payhip • IPRC • Multnomah County Library • OverDrive

or just about anywhere else book-shaped objects might be found

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City of Roses is an epic urban fantasy firmly set in Portland, Oregon—a wicked concoction of the urban pastoral and the incantatory fantastic, where knights are dubbed in Forest Park, and duels are fought in Pioneer Square, where union meetings are beseiged by ghost bicycles, and the Devil keeps a morgue in an abandoned big-box store. —It’s the story of Jo Maguire, a highly strung, underemployed telemarketer, and what happens when she meets Ysabel, a princess of unspecified pedigree. Jo rather unexpectedly becomes Ysabel’s guardian and caretaker, and now must make a place for herself among Ysabel’s decidedly unusual family and friends—which involves rather more sword-play than most of us are used to, these days.

The story is published in novelette-sized zines, on paper, and online: 44 so far, to date. These novelettes are then collected in paperback and ebook collections, of which four have been published so far: “Wake up…”, The Dazzle of Day, In the Reign of Good Queen Dick, and —or Betty Martin.

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“Wake up...”
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The Dazzle of Day.
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In the Reign of Good Queen Dick.
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or Betty Martin.
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Author Photos

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Illustration by Jenn Manley Lee.
Illustration by Jenn Manley Lee

Recent selfie.
Recent selfie

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PORTLAND, November 18 — Supersticery Press is pleased to announce the launch of the third season of City of Roses, the acclaimed urban fantasy webserial by Kip Manley.

As with the first two seasons (Autumn into Winter and Spring; Summer), the third season, Summer, will be serialized in novelette-sized chapbooks available online, and as paper ’zines. This season sees our protagonists—Jo Maguire, Gallowglas to the Court of Roses, and Ysabel Perry, Queen—miles apart, and mountains between them, and great endless forests; the novelettes will alternate, between Ysabel, here in the city, and Jo, on the coast, in her hometown of Newport.

The first novelettes of each sequence have just been released: no. 45, June 23rd, and no. 46, June 24th, available as paper ’zines and as ebooks on itch.io.

City of Roses has been reattaching the wonder-generating mechanisms of fantasy to the city of Portland for almost twenty years now. Bookslut has called the overall epic an “entire, swirling, beautiful mess.” and the Web Fiction Guide said it’s “utterly captivating” and “brilliant.” The Guardian said, “City of Roses is an absorbing read that many fantasy fans will enjoy immensely,” and the Oregonian once called it, “just another Portland story.”

Please address any questions to the author and publisher, Kip Manley, at kipmanley@yahoo.com. (Kip Manley was, some time ago, a senior editor and staff writer for Portland’s late, lamented Anodyne magazine. He currently lives in Portland with the celebrated cartoonist Jenn Manley Lee and the generally astounding Taran Jack. Mostly he just wanders about the city looking for cool places to stage sword fights.)

Nos. 45 & 46.

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