Coming November 3, 2025 from Interstellar Flight Press

Official publisher website here

Advance praise for The House of Illusionists

“Vanessa Fogg possesses that rare gift—the ability to make the mythic feel lived-in and the everyday feel numinous. Her stories move like water through reality’s cracks: A mother recognizes the demon she once saved. Doomed guardians discover fanfiction of their own apocalypse. Scientists preserve love in quantum memory. With prose that shifts between crystalline clarity and dreamlike dissolution, Fogg shows us magic that wounds and heals in the same breath.”—Yi Izzy Yu, writer and translator of The Shadow Book of Ji Yun

“The House of Illusionists is a treasure box for anyone who loves exquisitely crafted speculative fiction. Every story spins its own kind of quiet, lustrous magic, and in every story, in every character, Fogg finds a twist, a turn, a chink, a crack, a different point of view. One of the things I love most about Fogg’s stories is that she has a singular ability to portray love in all its messy, complex, everyday glory, always finding beauty in the darkness, and the darkness in what’s beautiful.” —Maria Haskins, editor, reviewer, and author of Wolves & Girls

“In The House of Illusionists, author Vanessa Fogg guides us through black lakes of despair, starving cities, and fanfiction futures, breaking barriers in a sweeping, otherworldly collection that speaks to the heart of humanity. This book squeezed every emotion out of me. Possibly my favourite read of the year. Transcendent and timely.”—Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Grotesque: Monster Stories

“Vanessa Fogg’s ethereal stories have the alarming delicacy of an unbreakable wire net that, when pulled tight, can cut right through your heart. Encompassing science fiction, folklore-informed fantasy, humor, and horror, The House of Illusionists holds human relationships cupped in its hands and gently, mercilessly reveals their paradoxical fragility and strength. The sweetness, but also the bitterness.” —Francesca Forrest, author of the novellas, The Inconvenient God and Lagoonfire, and the novel Pen Pal.

“Fogg’s gorgeous language and fantastical worlds are a means of exploring the human heart. Each story in this collection is masterfully done, and the whole is absolutely stunning!” —A.C. Wise, author of Out of the Drowning Deep

“Vanessa Fogg is one of my favourite writers, living or dead, and The House of Illusionists and Other Stories is my favourite collection of short fiction – full stop. Fogg’s stories are deeply atmospheric and transporting, lush with beautiful prose and imagery, and steeped in wonder and love. Fogg is equally skilled at crafting her magic and science with one hand, and at exploring intricate and realistic relationships with the other, and in her fiction she merges these elements together into a brilliant whole. I cried multiple times. A real treat.” —Ephiny Gale, author of the story collections Next Curious Thing and Pick Your Potion