Salon Fantastique

Expand your vision of what a fantasy story can be with tales by Peter S. Beagle, Lucius Shepard, Catherynne M. Valente, Paul Di Filippo, and others. Winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology Inspired by the literary salons of eighteenth-century France, Salon Fantastique brings together renowned authors to create and share new tales that show the fantasy form at its best. The resulting stories form a conversation between established and emerging writers, historical and contemporary fiction, timeless folklore themes and the immediacy of modern politics, traditional linear narratives, and more experimental storytelling. Kicking off the collection is Delia Sherman’s “La Fée Verte,” in which a nineteenth-century prostitute takes a lover among the other women in a Parisian bordello, a mysterious wraith who sees the past, present, and future. In Catherynne M. Valente’s “A Gray and Soundless Tide,” a woman shelters a selkie and learns her tragic story, while in Paul Di Filippo’s “Femaville 29,” a tsunami gives birth to a glorious new city rising from the imagination of children. In the intimate company of today’s master fantasists, you’ll be gifted with stories that will take the genre in directions you never could have imagined . . . “Bring[s] together mostly new fantasy writers, most of them contributors to previous Datlow/Windling books and perhaps forming a distinct ‘school.’ Call it American magic realism.” —Publishers Weekly “A roster of fifteen contributors to make any lover of literary fantasy go weak at the knees. . . . an anthology that rewards reflection.” —Strange Horizons

The twenty-eight stories in this collection imaginatively take us far across the universe, into the very core of our beings, to the realm of the gods, and the moment just after now. Included here are the works of masters of the form and of bright new talents, including: * Cory Doctorow * Robert Charles Wilson * Michael Swanwick * Ian McDonald * Benjamin Rosenbaum * Kage Baker * Bruce McAllister * Alastair Reynolds * Jay Lake * Ruth Nestvold * Gregory Benford * Justin Stanchfield * Walter Jon Williams * Greg Van Eekhout * Robert Reed * David D. Levine * Paul J. McAuley * Mary Rosenblum * Daryl Gregory * Jack Skillingstead * Paolo Bacigalupi * Greg Egan * Elizabeth Bear * Sarah Monette * Ken MacLeod * Stephen Baxter * Carolyn Ives Gilman * John Barnes * A.M. Dellamonica Supplementing the stories are the editor's insightful summation of the year's events and a list of honorable mentions, making this book a valuable resource in addition to serving as the single best place in the universe to find stories that stir the imagination and the heart.

A riveting Hitchcockian thriller from the screenwriter of THE CROW. Elias McCabe is having one hell of a night: He gets kidnapped at gunpoint by a professional hit man and is forced to shoot blackmail photos of a prominent politician. Things go wrong with the shoot... very wrong. When the night is over, Elias is scared to death ... and ten thousand dollars richer. If he keeps his mouth shut. But he doesn't — and now the hit man has targeted him for payback. As a desperate amateur in the games of death, Elias is up against a seasoned pro. As his entire life slides into the abyss, he has to stay alive by inventing new ways, moment-by-moment, to avoid, misdirect, and finally confront his ever-more-determined murderer as corpses and collateral damage stack up coast-to-coast in their wake.

Collects fantasy, horror, fairy tales, and gothic stories chosen from the past year, including works by Ursula K. LeGuin, Neil Gaiman, and Bill Lewis.

“Delightful . . . A treat for dictionary hounds and vocabulary-challenged word lovers everywhere.”—Booklist For most of us, these prizewinning spelling bee words would be difficult to pronounce, let alone spell. We asked twenty-one of today’s most talented and inventive writers to go even further and pen an original tale inspired by one of dozens of obscure and fascinating championship words. The result is Logorrhea—a veritable dictionary of the weird, the fantastic, the haunting, and the indefinable that will have you spellbound from the very first page. Including twenty-one stories and the inscrutable words that inspired them: Chiaroscuro: “The Chiaroscurist” by Hal Duncan Lyceum: “Lyceum” by Liz Williams Vivisepulture: “Vivisepulture” by David Prill Eczema: “Eczema” by Clare Dudman Sacrilege, Semaphore: “Semaphore” by Alex Irvine Smaragdine: “The Smaragdine Knot” by Marly Youmans Insouciant: “A Portrait in Ivory” by Michael Moorcock Cambist: “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” by Daniel Abraham Logorrhea: “Logorrhea” by Michelle Richmond Pococurante: “Pococurante” by Anna Tambour Autochthonous: “From Around Here” by Tim Pratt Vignette: “Vignette” by Elizabeth Hand Sycophant: “Plight of the Sycophant” by Alan DeNiro Elegiacal: “The Last Elegy” by Matthew Cheney Eudaemonic: “Eudaemonic” by Jay Caselberg Macerate: “Softer” by Paolo Bacigalupi Transept: “Crossing the Seven” by Jay Lake Psoriasis: “Tsuris” by Leslie What Euonym: “The Euonymist” by Neil Williamson Dulcimer: “Singing of Mount Abora” by Theodora Goss Appoggiatura: “Appoggiatura” by Jeff VanderMeer “This book is a logophile’s dream—a left-field collection of stories inspired by winning words from the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Anyone who has ever spent an hour or two happily browsing the pages of a dictionary will find something to love here.”—Kevin Brockmeier, author of A Brief History of the Dead

In this haunting, richly woven novel of modern life in Japan, the author of the acclaimed debut One for Sorrow explores the ties that bind humanity across the deepest divides. Here is a Murakamiesque jewel box of intertwined narratives in which the lives of several strangers are gently linked through love, loss, and fate. On a train filled with quietly sleeping passengers, a young man’s life is forever altered when he is miraculously seen by a blind man. In a quiet town an American teacher who has lost her Japanese lover to death begins to lose her own self. On a remote road amid fallow rice fields, four young friends carefully take their own lives—and in that moment they become almost as one. In a small village a disaffected American teenager stranded in a strange land discovers compassion after an encounter with an enigmatic red fox, and in Tokyo a girl named Love learns the deepest lessons about its true meaning from a coma patient lost in dreams of an affair gone wrong. From the neon colors of Tokyo, with its game centers and karaoke bars, to the bamboo groves and hidden shrines of the countryside, these souls and others mingle, revealing a profound tale of connection—uncovering the love we share without knowing. Exquisitely perceptive and deeply affecting, Barzak’s artful storytelling deftly illuminates the inner lives of those attempting to find—or lose—themselves in an often incomprehensible world.