Previously
of Somerville, MA, where he lived in a 212-year-old house and was gainfully
employed doing fabulous things with programs with names like Quark and
Framemaker in the service of producing books and other print projects for
a couple of publishing outfits, Bryan Cholfin has operated his own small
press publishing company, Broken Mirrors Press, since 1988.
A devotee
of the work of R.A. Lafferty (a proselytizer in the cause -- even a fanatic
-- one might say), Bryan has personally published Lafferty's novel Sinbad,
the Thirteenth Voyage and the collection Lafferty In Orbit and recently
has agreed to edit a large Lafferty retrospective on spec. His World
Fantasy Award-winning work as a publisher, which has also produced collections
from David Bunch and Gene Wolfe as well as a novel from Michael Kandel,
is now confined to the production of Crank!, a little magazine widely appreciated
for its high editorial standard -- and for paying its (innovative, imaginative,
you bet!) writers big-publication rates.
It is this
excellence -- and, possibly, the editor's uncompromising crankiness --
that has persuaded Tor to bring out THE BEST OF CRANK! in 1998. This,
we hope and believe, will be only the first of his projects as an anthologist.
Bryan, in
fact, is currently employed by Tor, where he labors as a poorly paid editorial
assistant but does get to edit Graham Joyce, for one. He now lives
in Brooklyn. He is exceedingly fond of his Maine Coon cat, complains
that it's hard to find good ice cream in New York, likes brownies, cheesecake
and coffee. He claims to be able to make "really fabulous" chocolate-chip
oatmeal cookies.
