A collection to highlight upcoming voices in fantasy. I know a lot of these authors from being a fan of some of these authors. They all write in what could be considered a new era of fantasy, one that tries to push the boundaries of the already fantastical. A couple of these stories I'd read before and loved. I enjoyed quite a lot of them, although I am not sure a few are fantasy as much as about human nature, and some are on the border of speculative, scifi and fantasy, which I'm not too much of a stickler to care about. Overall, a great collection that encapsulates the breadth of what is being done with fantasy in today's publishing. My favorites were Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers, Tornado's Siren, Left the Century to Sit Unmoved, A kiss with Teeth, Jackalope Wives, The Tallest Doll in New York City, The One they took before, The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn.

This is one of the best fantasy collections I’ve read in a long time. It is a lovely blend of fascinating and disturbing (mostly) urban fantasy stories pulling from and playing with folklore and mythology. Most are already award-winning stories. All are compelling and they are great examples of a diverse field of up and coming stars including Sofia Samatar, Max Gladstone, Ursula Vernon, E. Lily Yu, Maria Dahvana Headley, Hannu Rajaniemi, Amal El-Mohtar, Usman T. Malik just to name a few of the 19 authors.
My favorites included “Jackalope Wives” by Vernon which shows a wise grandmother having to clean up a mess made by her foolish grandson. I loved Headley’s “The Tallest Doll in New York City” in which the Chrysler Building is done waiting for the Empire State Building to make its move. “The Haunting of Apollo ACLB” by Rajaniemi is a funny and sad ghost story. And “The Practical Witch’s Guide to Acquiring Real Estate” by A. C. Wise is an informative and humorous brochure. Gladstone’s “A Kiss with Teeth” looks at the dangers of trying to fit in versus being your authentic self. Brooke Bolander’s love-struck tornado! Sarah Pinsker’s pond that may or may not disappear people. Kelly Sandoval’s story of a woman adjusting to life after being away a year and a day. Really, these stories were all so good!

Sadly uneven. While there were a few really beautiful stories, overall I found this anthology not as great as it could have been. Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weismann collected short stories by authors they think will influence the future of fantasy. As such this is a very varied anthology with different outlooks on what constitutes "fantasy" as a genre. There were some really innovative story telling techniques employed and some stories I really adored - but some felt flat for me. I guess that is always going to be the case when it comes to anthologies this broad.

It took me a while to get into this collection as the first five stories did not particularly wow me. While I thought "Tornado's Siren" (about a tornado who is in love with a girl) had a really interesting premise, the execution, especially in regards to the characters, fell flat for me; whereas "A Kiss with Teeth" just bored me to death - a vampire as a urban dad with midlife crisis just is not something I am very interested in. This is exemplary of how much of the collection read for me: many stories were just boring or not as well rounded as I would have liked.

But still, there were some stories I really, absolutely, completely adored:

Jackalope Wives by Ursula Vernon: wimsy, sad, poignant, and reminiscent of classical fairy tales with a twist: very much my thing.

The Haunting of Apollo A7LB by Hannu Rajaniemi: funny, quiet, political, unexpected, and wonderfully hopeful.

The One They Took Before by Kelly Sandoval: mean, sad, wonderful, difficult to get into at first but very rewarding in the end (oh the ending was so beautiful and hopeful and sad).

The Husband Stitch by Carmen Maria Machado: stunning, weird, feminist, sad, dark, wonderful. My absolute favourite of the bunch. And I am glad because I have been wanting to read her forthcoming debut collection for a while and now I cannot wait. This is just my type of dark magical realism that I adore in short stories. If you only read one of those stories: read this one.

I think this collection is broad enough to offer something for everybody - while this is a strength it also is a weakness as I found the anthology too uneven for my taste.

A great collection of diverse voices. There is a lot to love here.

This review originally appeared on http://fictionistmag.com/.

★★★★★

They bring you childhood stories gone wrong, magical creatures in heat, a building that’s alive and full of waiters, love, ducks, and a new take on a bloodsucking fiend.

Nineteen emerging fantasy voices brought together by Peter S. Beagle shine in this new anthology. That sounded like a PR tagline, but I swear, this anthology is great.

It's honestly a breath of fresh air. I'm anti-spoiler in these reviews, and since these stories are so short, it's hard to talk about them at all without giving anything away.

Suffice it to say that these stories range from entertaining to creepy to thought-provoking, and the writing is top notch. These little stories stick in your mind like popcorn sticks in your gums. You'll try to shake one story off before you read the next one, but by page two of the next story, you're hooked on that one too.

The best part about a good anthology is that there's no 'book two.' You don't have to wait a year to know what happens -- in fact, you'll only have to wait 20 pages or so to find out what happens in these stories. Reading so many stories at once also made me feel pretty accomplished, especially after reading so many full-length novels week after week.

If you need a palate cleanser, or if you're craving some unique fantasy stories, or if you need some shorter reads -- no matter the reason, definitely pick up The New Voices of Fantasy.

Five stars from me. Perfect, bite-sized pieces of beautifully-crafted fantasy morsels.

What a great way to find new authors. This book of short stories has a wide array of characters and various genres. With 19 writers, many of whom I'm not familiar you find great diversity of style and length. Enjoy, Enjoy, Enjoy
Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong
“Selkie Stories are for Losers” by Sofia Samatar
“Tornado’s Siren” by Brooke Bolander
“Left the Century to Sit Unmoved” by Sarah Pinsker
“A Kiss with Teeth” by Max Gladstone
“Jackalope Wives” by Ursula Vernon
“The Cartographer Wasps and Anarchist Bees” by E. Lily Yu
“The Practical Witch’s Guide to Acquiring Real Estate” by A. C. Wise
“The Tallest Doll in New York City” by Maria Dahvana Headley
“The Haunting of Apollo A7LB” by Hannu Rajaniemi
“Here Be Dragons” by Chris Tarry
“The One They Took Before” by Kelly Sandoval
“Tiger Baby” by JY Yang
“The Duck” by Ben Loory
“Wing” by Amal El-Mohtar
“The Philosophers” by Adam Ehrlich Sachs
“My Time Among the Bridge Blowers” by Eugene Fischer
“The Husband Stitch” by Carmen Maria Machado
“The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn” by Usman T. Malik

This was a good collection of short stories and a great way of finding new authors. With any short story collections, there are going to be some that you enjoy more than others and this was the case with this collection. Having said that they were all good in their own way. If you are a big fantasy reader then this is worth reading.

Do you want to learn about the new kids on the block? This anthology gives a very good answer: it collects nineteen stories from the last five years. The editors provide great introductions to every story and gathered a great, balanced selection of stories.
I can fully recommend it to readers of fantasy literature who are curious about what topics, styles, and authors drive the publishing circus these days.

Not for me - the stories here seemed to be briefed to aim for 'dark & modern' rather than 'satisfyingly in the fantasy genre'. Perhaps a different title would have better described what the collection contains.

This is a well thought out collection of short stories from writers who are ‘reinventing fantasy right now.’ I have never read a collection of works like this before and I’m still not sure how best to review it without writing 19 separate reviews…

In the interest of brevity I’ll pick out some of the stories that really stuck with me.

I adored ‘Tornado’s Siren’ which is a short story about a girl whom a tornado falls in love with. Yes, you read that right. The tornado falls in love with her. This should be an utterly ridiculous concept but it was written so wonderfully well I wanted to weep at the end!

‘The Cartographer Wasps and Anarchist Bees’ is another story that completely captivated me. That title isn’t a metaphor. This is about wasps that make maps and bees that reject governance. A short story that, again, should not in any way work but it was phenomenally well written!

“The Husband Stitch” by Carmen Maria Machado was possibly my favourite story. The voice in this story is just so gentle it lulls you away from reality. It’s not a pleasant story to read, however, and the jolt away from that lull is powerful.

There were a few stories that were less my speed, though none of them were ‘bad’ as such. I think this is probably actually a strong selling point since there is bound to be at least one story in here that suits everyone.

As I say I hadn’t read any collections like this before and it did send me into a bit of a reading slump just because the short story format doesn’t let me get my teeth into anything. Having said that, I think this is just me and someone else would probably get on much better with the format.

I honestly won’t be surprised if, in a few years, a number of my favourite books have been penned by these authors, I am excited to see where they go next.

My rating: 5/5 stars for the sheer variety!

By the way, I received a digital advanced review copy of this title from the publisher (Tachyon Publications) in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

really enjoyed most of these stories, especially "Hungry Daughters of Starving Mother's", "The Practical Witch's Guide to Acquiring Real Estate" and "The Haunting of Apollo A7LB". These three in particular just felt so unique and well-crafted. Some of the other stories didn't seem to be too different or it felt like I'd heard them before, but overall had good writing.

The ones I did enjoy, were good enough to make me want to look out for those specific authors, but there weren't enough strong ones to get more than 3 stars from me, unfortunately.

On the sci-fi / fantasy spectrum, I've always leaned a bit more towards sci-fi, but was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the majority of stories in this collection! There is a lot of creativity on display, and I can see why so many of the authors have gone on to win numerous awards.

Calling it "new" voices is maybe a bit of a stretch, since some of these stories are as old as 2013, but they were all new to me and the fact that there were newer works to look up by the authors I particularly enjoyed is a bonus. As with all compilations, there were some pieces I enjoyed less than others ... but overall I felt the selection was very good! My favourite was "Left the Century to Sit Unmoved" - wonderful ambiance and creep and such tight storytelling for such a short piece.

Peter S. Beagle edits this collection of fantasy stories by newly emerging authors. As with any collection I liked some of the stories, I didn't like others. What interested me is how far line between SF and Fantasy has moving toward the Fantasy side, squeezing SF into a smaller and smaller box.

One of the stories here reminded me of "Or All the Seas with Oysters" by Avram Davidson which won the Hugo in 1958. Galaxy Science Fiction published in May 1958.

Now in those days the Fantasy label was more or less reserved for stories that included magic and it was called "Swords and Sorcery" (e.g. Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd or Michael Moorcock's Elric). SF was the non-magical other place. So "Or All the Seas with Oysters" was SF. Not so today. It seems that SF now needs space ships.

Gernsback and Campbell shift in their graves, having spun already dozens of times.

I received a review copy of "The New Voices of Fantasy" by Eugene Fisher, Brooke Bolander, Amal El-Mohtar, Maria Dahvana Headley, Max Gladstone, Ben Loory, Carmen Maria Machado, Usman T. Malik, Sarah Pinsker, Hannu Rajaniemi, Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Sofia Samatar, Kelly Sandoval, Chris Tarry, A. C. Wise, Alyssa Wong, JY Yang, E. Lily Yu, Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon) through NetGalley.com.

ARC provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I love supporting under-hyped books and authors, and these are nineteen up and coming fantasy authors that each contributed a short story for this anthology. I mean, how could I not request an ARC of this? I absolutely love the thought that went in to this, and I'm so very thankful that Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman curated this.

Yet, I do think that these curators are being very liberal with the word "new". Some of these short stories were released in 2014 and 2015. Some of these authors are very well known and published. I didn't let this impact my rating or reading experience, but I think it's important to note it is a very loose term here.

I also feel like this would be a perfect October/Fall read, because even though this is pitched as a fantasy collection, which it is, but I couldn't help but feel like it had much more of an eerie, almost horror, vibe. Most all of the stories are set in our world, in our time, so if you're looking for dragons, dwarfs, fae, and elves, you've come to the wrong anthology.

Yet, a few of these short stories completely captured my heart and very quickly made me a new fan of the authors. The Tallest Doll in New York City by Maria Dahvana Headley, Jackalope Wives by Ursula Vernon, and Wing by Amal El-Mohtar were some of my favorites and I gave each story a perfect five stars. These stories just felt a tier above most and were just so impactful and beautifully written. I am a sucker for lyrical prose, and all three of these authors completely delivered.

My personal favorite in the whole collection is, hands down, The Husband Stitch by Carmen Maria Machado. I am in awe of this story and its utter perfection. One of the best feminist works I've ever read in my life, and one of the most powerful pieces of art, too. If you can only read one short story of these nineteen, please pick this one. It's life changing and so very important.

I'm going to break down each short story with my thoughts, opinions, and individual star rating! Also, all but three of these short stories can be found and read online for free. I will include a link in the title of the story that will direct you to a source that will allow you to read it for free if you are interested.

➽ Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers by Alyssa Wong - ★★★★
This first short story completely hooked me. A girl uses Tinder to find dates who are petty criminals and feeds off their impure thoughts. Yet, she gets more than she bargained for when she becomes addicted to feasting off an actual killer. Now her hunger knows no bounds, and to protect the girl she secretly likes she has to find another way to sate her hunger.

➽ Selkie Stories are for Losers by Sofia Samatar - ★★
This one for sure feels like it could dip into the horror category, too, but it never really got scary. It is sort of story of stories and the whole theme revolves around the mythical folklore creatures, selkies. Selkies are seals who are able to shed their skin and turn human to dwell on land among us. Sadly, this just didn't work for me, and the buildup left a lot to be desired.

➽ Tornado’s Siren by Brooke Bolander - ★★★
This is a very unique short about a girl that has caught the attention of a tornado one stormy evening. She is only nine at the time, but it follows her periodically through her growing up to become an adult. After years of attempted normalcy, our main character realizes that she doesn't want to be normal after all. I enjoyed this, and I loved the open ending, but it wasn't my favorite in the collection.

➽ Left the Century to Sit Unmoved by Sarah Pinsker - ★★★
This is a very, very short little story about a local pond where only the bravest of townsfolk jump off a waterfall into it. There are rules to jumping in this pond, and this pond is said to just take people. They can dredge it up, but no bodies are every found, only the swimsuits that float to the surface. Our main character is obsessed with jumping in it, ever since her brother went missing after his jump. This story is beautifully written, and the message very strong, especially with the length of this one.

➽ A Kiss with Teeth by Max Gladstone - ★
This story was so difficult for me to read. I didn't connect with the writing style whatsoever, and it felt ungodly longer than the rest of the stories in this collection. This story focuses on a modern day version of Vlad the Impaler, where he is trying to live a normal life, and raise a normal son, while also trying to control his urge to function as a vampire. He becomes obsessed with his son's teacher, and begins to literally stalk her. To drink from? To kill? To fuck? Who knows, but it is supposed to be a "you can work out your problems if you love each other enough, while still being able to be who you are" story, but it didn't work in the slightest for me. Also, I'm just personally so sick of Vlad the Impaler retellings.

➽ Jackalope Wives by Ursula Vernon - ★★★★★
Good Lord, this story was so close to perfect! I absolutely loved and adored it. Twist and turns throughout, with a perfect ending, all wrapped up in such a short tale. This story is about jackalope rabbits, which can turn into very beautiful women, who love to dance the night away. Many men desire to make them their wives, and by stealing the rabbit coats they shed while dancing, but by doing so you will also be trapping them into not being able to shift back into their rabbit forms. Some very cruel men burn their skins, while forcing them to be humans forever.

➽ The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees by E. Lily Yu - ★★★★
This was the first story in the collection that every aspect felt like fantasy. We are thrown into this amazingly beautiful, but ruthless, community of bees and wasps and a couple other insects. We get to see the hierarchy within the wasps, and the demands they make of the bees. We get to see, as the title suggests, their uses of maps and how they take note of the events happening in their world. I really enjoyed this, and the writing was superb.

➽ The Practical Witch’s Guide to Acquiring Real Estate by A. C. Wise - ★
This is exactly what the title implies, a section by section guide on how to buy a residence if you are a witch. Now, I'm sure this will be super cute, charming, and funny to many readers out there, but it totally fell flat for me. It just felt very forced, while trying to be funny, but it just came across as cringey. Plus, (not that I am the expert on witches buying or creating homes) it felt very basic with its "witch knowledge". I feel really bad saying this, but I didn't enjoy this at all.

➽ The Tallest Doll in New York City by Maria Dahvana Headley - ★★★★★
Be still, my heart! This was so amazingly unique! I loved it! This story is set in New York, where the tall buildings and structures move on their own. This tale is told on Valentine's Day, and the storyteller is a waiter in a club that works high up inside one of these moving buildings. I loved seeing all these iconic structures choose one another and pair up for Valentine's Day. And the story is told so beautifully, whimsically, and romantically, that you can't help but fall in love with it.

➽ The Haunting of Apollo A7LB by Hannu Rajaniemi - ★★★
A woman is dealing with the death of her lover from her past, when she gets a knock on her door from that person's moon suit, that she helped sew, which is a little scary because that person has died. At first sight, she believes it to be his ghost, but soon realizes that there is someone else inside of it. The suit is compelling him to do things that he normally would never do, and now it has showed up on her doorstep. This short story definitely talks about differences in races and classes and how far we still need to go, but also about love and how far we are willing to go for the ones we love.

➽ Here Be Dragons by Chris Tarry - ★
This is easily my least favorite in the whole collection. Trigger warnings for child abuse, even though it's written about in a disgustingly light way. This story is about two men who are pretty much medieval con-artists, who "slay dragons" for wealth and fame. Well, now they have come home to actually be fathers to their children, while their wives work, but they can't deal with that apparently, because, you know, sexism, and then they both have separate epiphanies that they aren't cut out for this father thing, when they could have fame, glory, and prostitutes. I understand not every story has to have likable main characters, but I literally hated both of these men from start to finish.

➽ The One They Took Before by Kelly Sandoval - ★★★★
This story was just the perfect about of ominous and eerie. It all starts with a rift in the universe and an ad on Craigslist in Seattle. Our main character is constantly battling her inner feelings whether or not she wants to return to her abductors that are not from our world. It was such a good balance of realistic and whimsical, and my only real complaint is that I wish there was more that I could read.

➽ Tiger Baby by JY Yang - ★★
I feel somewhat torn about rating this story. This short is about a girl who is being constantly haunted by her dreams of being a tiger, which she also believes is her "true form" and aspires to become it. She doesn't have the best life and constantly feels so much different than her peers. All of this, and the many metaphors, could have packed a big punch, but instead it fell short because our main protagonist isn't a teenager feeling like an outcast that can't connect with anyone, instead she is over thirty years old and refuses to seek out help.

➽ The Duck by Ben Loory - ★★★★
This was short and cute and extremely unexpectedly powerful. On paper, this is a story about a duck that fell in love with a rock, but it's truly a story about helping people you love and understanding and accepting them for who they are. With true friends, we can accomplish so much and we can help heal others and make so many people happy. This was really good, and I highly recommend.

➽ Wing by Amal El-Mohtar - ★★★★★
This might be the most beautiful story in the whole collection. This short story is so romantic and so expertly written. My interruption is that soul mates are rare, but always worth the wait, and sharing yourself body and soul with someone else is something indescribable. We will have many loves in our lives, but when you find that person who you can share all your secrets with you will realize why it never worked out with anyone else. I loved this so very much, and I loved the imagery in this, and I loved picturing a girl with a book of secrets around her neck. Seriously, this was perfection.

➽ The Philosophers by Adam Ehrlich Sachs - ★★
This is three mini stories; all surrounding a discussion about boys and their fathers. It's about becoming what they expect you to be, becoming what you have no powering to not become, and how one day the boy will become the father. If I'm being honest, this wasn't bad, but it just tried too damn hard to sound prolific. And it wasn't that I couldn't relate, but I just didn't care to read three stories of different father and son relationships.

➽ My Time Among the Bridge Blowers by Eugene Fischer - ★★
This was just ungodly boring. It's about a man, traveling with another man, to a village tribe that's unlike anything he's ever known, and then closes very mysteriously and very open-ended. Maybe there is some very introspective meaning here that just went over my head, but I just didn't enjoy this.


➽ The Husband Stitch by Carmen Maria Machado - ★★★★★
Oh my God. This was the best short story I have ever read in my entire life. I'm writing this review in tears, because it was so immensely powerful. My hands are shaking, because this story is so real and so relevant. My stomach is in knots, because I'm not sure any combination of words I will create will do this story justice. This story is very feminist and very sexually explicit, but so damn important. It's about the life of a woman, who gives everything to men and never is allowed to keep anything for herself. It's about life's expectations on women, and how society shapes the choices we do and do not have. It's about how, no matter what, giving everything will never be good enough as a woman. It's about enjoying and exploring your sexuality, yet trying to cope with the shame. It's about never fully being able to become the person you are, but becoming the person your husband and/or family require you to be. It's about having children, who will just repeat the same vicious and unfair cycle. I wish I could put this story in everyone's hands.

➽ The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn by Usman T. Malik - ★★★★
This story was so very long, but was rather enjoyable. It's about a boy, who has been obsessed with a story his grandfather has told him since he was young, about a princess, her two sisters, and a jinn that protected them all. This family lives in the states now, but the story is from Pakistan. After a few turn of events, the boy, now a man, picks up his life and goes to Pakistan to see if his grandfather's story was just a story. Also, this story has such a beautiful ending.

I gave The New Voices of Fantasy 3 stars overall, because out of a possible 95 stars (5 stars possible for each of the 19 stories) this collection accumulated 60 stars (63%).

Great selection of stories and authors. Don't be surprised if you grab a copy and find yourself
trying to find more work from these authors.
Not a bad apple in the bunch. And being a big fan of this type of collection believe me that is special.

"The New Voices of Fantasy" is an eclectic mixture of diverse fantasy authors, featuring a multitude of subgenres in stories set around the globe. Although the short story format means that the worlds and cultures the authors have created appear only in snippet form, which is not normally my favorite way to experience fantasy, this collection is filled with beautifully written stories, and was a good way to sample the styles of authors I either had been considering reading but had not gotten around to, or had never encountered before at all.

Like all anthologies of this type, some stories will be more to a given reader's taste than others, but all of them of them are well-crafted. The authors all have impressive credentials, including multiple awards and training at various MFA programs or at places like Clarion West and Iowa. Unsurprisingly, the stories do tend to have that "MFA feel" to them, full of symbolism and finely honed language, which is a specific writing style that either you like or you don't. So while fantasy, this collection is definitely highbrow fantasy, and it's up to you whether that's your thing or not. However, given that this is a collection of short stories, the commitment to each individual story is not great, so this is a good opportunity to browse and try something different.

And there are certainly some excellent pieces of fantasy fiction here, spanning everything from folk tales to dark fantasy/horror to sci fi with a fantasy edge. Some particularly standout stories for me were Ursula Vernon's "Jackalope Wives," a distinctly American take on the story of the skinchanging wife, E. Lily Yu's "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees," a Chinese-infused fable/allegory about insect communities, and Usman T. Malik's "The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn," about a first-generation American son of Pakistani immigrants who discovers mystical secrets about his past. But every single one of the stories included in this collection was highly worth reading, and I would recommend this anthology to anyone interested in trying out some "literary" and multicultural fantasy by up-and-coming authors.

My thanks to NetGalley for providing a review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

This was an excellent anthology of new authors who are the rising stars of the genre. Many are already winning impressive awards for their work. In many cases, the stories reprinted in this volume are the very ones for which they won those awards. Because of this, if you pay much attention to short fiction in fantasy and sci-fi, you may have read many of the stories collected in this book before. Several of them were familiar to me. I didn't think that was a downside to this volume, though. If you've been wanting to read these authors' work but feel daunted at the prospect of tracking down individual stories spread out across a wide variety of publications, this is the book for you.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to become familiar with new, up-and-coming fantasy authors in a convenient, low-risk way. You may not like all of them, but they're all highly skilled authors playing around with interesting concepts and themes and this is a good representation of where I think the genre seems to be heading.

My personal favorites were "A Kiss With Teeth" by Max Gladstone, "The Cartographer Wasps and Anarchist Bees" by E. Lily Yu, "The Tallest Doll in New York City" by Maria Dahvana Headley, and "The Philosophers" by Adam Ehrlich Sachs. "Tornado’s Siren" by Brooke Bolander and "The Practical Witch’s Guide to Acquiring Real Estate" by A. C. Wise made me laugh.

This is a collection of fantasy short stories written by up-and-coming authors. It's a little bit of an eclectic collection; there's stories that represent many different cultures, beliefs, and subgenres of fantasy. The collection does a great job at representation, both in the authors that were selected as well as the stories that were shared.

While it's a decent collection, I found that the stories were either really, really good and engrossing or just fell flat. There seemed to be no real in-between for me. In fact, a few of the short stories really stretched the definition of "fantasy genre" for me. While I would like to say that the future of my beloved genre looks bright, I'd be lying. However, should some of the authors in this collection write a novel or two, it'd be something I'd be willing to check out from the library at some point in time.

I can't wait to read more from these authors. This is an excellent collection of emerging voices that each bring something new and fresh to fantasy.