Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy »

Ellen Datlow was editor of SCI FICTION, the multi award- winning fiction area of SCIFI.COM, for almost six years. Previously, she was fiction editor of Omni for over seventeen years. She has won the World Fantasy Award seven times, two Bram Stoker Awards, the International Horror Guild Award, the 2002 and 2005 Hugo Award, and the 2005 Locus Award, for her work as an editor. SCIFICTION won the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Website. Datlow and Windling are the co-editors of over eleven original anthologies and of seventeen volumes of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.

Terri Windling is an editor, writer, painter, and passionate advocate of mythic arts. She has won the World Fantasy Award seven times, as well as the Mythopoeic Award for her novel The Wood Wife. During the last two decades she's edited over twenty-five anthologies with Ellen Datlow, as well as several other anthologies, including one called Faery. Her paintings, which are based on folklore and feminist themes, have been exhibited at museums and galleries in the United States, England, and France.

Here are original stories that straddle the borderline between "fantasy" and "mainstream" fiction, stories both bright and dark in tone (without straying into the realm of horror fiction). Sometimes set in the contemporary or historical world, sometimes pure fantasy or an imagined "history," these are striking, fresh, finely crafted works that demonstrate the best the short story form has to offer. Among the authors included are Delia Sherman, Peter Beagle, Greer Gilman, Paul Di Filippo, Jeffrey Ford, Gregory Maguire, and Lucius Shepard.

Publishers Weekly

In this all-original anthology, the editors, longtime partners in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, bring 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. In most stories, a departure from (usually) contemporary reality is taken for granted, with no one asking questions or expressing wonder. In Jeffrey Ford's "The Night Whiskey," a small town holds a lottery to see who gets to drink magic wine made from a bush that only grows in corpses. The drunken winners are then ritually knocked out of the trees into which they climb while communing with ancestral ghosts. Why? It merely is. While Ford can make this approach work, the book's weakness is that many of the stories are poetic at the expense of sense. There is, however, an outstanding opener by Delia Sherman, plus good work by Peter S. Beagle, Lucius Shepard, Catherynne Valente and Paul Di Filippo. (Dec.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.