By Esther Friesner
Baen, $7.99, 407 pages
In this anthology, editor Esther Friesner has collected twenty-one hilarious stories of werewolves in suburbia. Soccer moms, angst-ridden teenagers, mid-life crisis dads, annoying little boys, and even a hardboiled detective find their way into these very funny stories. Of particular note are: Jody Lynn Nye’s “Howl,” which gives a man [...]
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Rachel Wallace
Rachel Wallace is a research assistant holding a Master’s degree in biology with a habit of moving every couple years. It would take all her fingers, and most of [...]
By Jay Lake
Tor, $26.95, 368 pages
Sex, politics, religion and magic are the tools of control of the city of Copper Downs in Jay Lake’s memoir-style fantasy. A heroic fantasy with a dash of steampunk, Green follows the story of the titular character as she relates her tale from her first memory of a death, is [...]
By John Joseph Adams
Prime Books, $14.95, 379 pages
For this anthology of twenty-four stories, editor John Joseph Adams tasked some of the brightest luminaries of speculative fiction to write stories of vast, galaxy-spanning empires and the people that live in them. From a rare Lois McMaster Bujold short story about the professions that arise in the [...]
By Marie Brennan
Orbit, $14.99, 438 pages
Award-winning author and professional folklorist Marie Brennan brings together a tumultuous time in English history with its ancient folklore of elfinkind to fabricate a novel that is historical in context and wonderfully fanciful in its content. Set in the period of English history between 1639 and 1666, the story follows [...]
By Jeffrey Ford
Golden Gryphon Press, $14.95, 319 pages
In this collection of fourteen stories, Nebula and World Fantasy Award winner Jeffrey Ford uses his personal experiences to create tales of myth and wonder. From the World Fantasy Award winner “Botch Town,” in which a model city becomes a metaphor for glimpses into a changing world; to [...]
By Isaac Asimov
Tor, $23.95, 239 pages
In this story of a far-flung humanity, the planet Florina is subjugated by the planet Sark. But when a Spatio-analyst learns that the world of Florina is soon to be extinct, a web of political intrigue that will change the relationship between Florina and Sark begins.
The story itself is small-scale, [...]
By Andre Norton
Baen, $14.00, 518 pages
In this collection of four novels set in the same universe by a SFWA Grand Master, the author repeatedly reflects on the great clash of civilizations and personal identity. In The Sioux Spaceman, Kade Whitehawk must bring his knowledge of plains culture into the far reaches of space to a [...]
Edited by Yanni Kuznia
Subterranean Press, $20.00, 133 pages
In this collection of four novellas, four women whose fantasy writing repeatedly tops the charts return to their worlds to tell stories about women with strength of character. Each tale presents a different facet of feminine heroism. In the humorous urban fantasy “Zen and the Art of Vampirism”, [...]
By Gene Wolfe
Tor, $29.95, 544 pages
In this retrospective of Wolfe’s short fiction, the author himself chooses the works that he considers to be his finest ever. In a career spanning over thirty years and many Hugo and Nebula awards, that is no mean feat. Wolfe showcases his trademark first person perspective of the unreliable narrator [...]
By Elizabeth Bear
Tor, $24.95, 368 pages
This Norse mythology-based novel is much like the Renshai novels of Mickey Zucker Reichert in its premise. In All the Windwracked Stars, the Valkyrie Muire has abandoned her brothers and sisters to die on the battlefield of Ragnarok. Forced by immortality to live through the age of man, she lives [...]
By Ian McDonald
Pyr, $15.00, 330 pages
Cyberabad Days is a collection of seven tales set in the world that McDonald created for his popular River of Gods novel, of which one was a Hugo winner and one a Hugo nominee. Each touches on timely, relevant idea about our society today and is set in near future [...]
By Brian Francis Slattery
Tor, $14.95, 304 pages
Slattery posits an apocalypse precipitated by an economic collapse – the USA is no more, and many of the ills of its history are rising up again. Slavery, power-mongering, criminality – who better to repair what is broken than the very best of the worst, the most notorious criminals [...]
By Jenna Helland
Wizards of the Coast, $7.99, 320 pages
In strict adventure, fantasy style, Jenna Helland’s debut novel, The Fanged Crown, the first novel in the Forgotten Realms The Wilds series, opens with a scene of non-stop action (a ship-to-ship fight) and never stops. With echoes of the grandmaster of adventure fantasy, Robert E. Howard, Helland [...]
By Trudi Canavan
Orbit, $24.99, 608 pages
I wouldn’t let The Magician’s Apprentice out of my sight. From page one, I dived deep into the characters – Tessia, Jayan, Dakon, Stara, and Hanara – each became my close personal friend, a person I cared for, and whose success was important to me, even though at times I [...]