Tachyon Books

This publisher, specializing in short fiction, has been around for close to 15 years. But it's expanded tremendously in recent years, growing to put out ten books per year. Authors in the Tachyon stable now include the late Thomas Disch, Cory Doctorow, Peter S. Beagle, Terry Bisson and Charles de Lint among many others. Known for single-author short story collections, Tachyon has started making more of a mark recently with anthologies like Steampunk, The Secret History Of Science Fiction, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and The New Weird. A lot of the most challenging and thrilling short fiction today is appearing in Tachyon's titles, one way or another. You can read our interview with Tachyon's Jacob Weisman here.

Night Shade Books

Another San Francisco press, Night Shade has been around for a dozen years. The company originally published only about four books a year, but now puts out 30-35 titles every year. And now Night Shade is putting out books from the likes of Iain M. Banks, Jay Lake, Neal Asher, Kage Baker, Paolo Bacigalupi, Walter Jon Williams and Greg Egan. And just like Tachyon, Night Shade has made huge inroads into the anthology market, with anthologies like The Living Dead, By Blood We Live and Wastelands. They've also put out Jonathan Strahan's "best of the year" anthologies and the Eclipse series, which we've been following with much excitement. Not to mention Ellen Datlow's Best Horror Of The Year anthologies. They've recently joined forces with the award-winning small press magazine Electric Velocipede. You can read our interview with Night Shade's Jeremy Lassen here.

ChiZine publishing

ChiZine started out as a webzine called Chiaroscuro, publishing horror, dark fiction and weird-ass shit, a decade ago. They started putting out books in spring 2008, and already they're up to 12 titles a year. And judging from recent offerings, they seem to be upholding their proud tradition of freakgnosis and terror. Recent books include Katya From The Punk Band by Simon Logan, A Book Of Tongues by Gemma Files, Chimerascope by Douglas Smith and The World More Full Of Weeping by Robert J. Wiersema.

Edge Science Fiction & Fantasy Publishing (and Tesseract Books)

This indy has been around since 2000, and now includes Tesseract Books. They seem to put out a lot of horror, including the Tesseracts anthology series, but also a fair amount of regular science fiction and fantasy. One of their recent releases is the intriguingly titled Time Machines Repaired While U Wait by K.A. Benford. That seems to be a kid-friendly title, and some of their books, like A Petrified World, are labeled as aimed at children ages eight and up.

Subterranean Press

Specializing in the horror, suspense and dark mystery genres, this publisher puts out tons of books by Poppy Z. Brite, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Ray Bradbury and Kage Baker. Fans of Alastair Reynolds will need to track down their recent flipbook of two novellas: Thousandth Night (set in the same world as House Of Suns) and Minla's Flowers. Coming soon: The Best Of Peter S. Beagle, which looks amazing. They have a close relationship with Joe Lansdale, allowing them to put out limited editions of many of his books. Their limited editions, generally, are fantastic and often have great illustrations, recently including Dan Simmons' The Terror and John Scalzi's The Last Colony.

Golden Gryphon

Founded in 1997, this small press survived the death of its founder, Jim Turner, in 1999, and is still putting out books — including The Empire Of Ice Cream and The Fantasy Writer's Assistant by the great Jeffrey Ford. They also put out Nancy Kress' Nano Comes To Clifford Falls And Other Stories and George Alec Effinger's Budayeen Nights, plus books by Mike Resnick and George Zebrowski. Their website looks a bit like it was last redesigned in 1997, but their books are fantastic.

Damnation Books

I had not heard of this publisher until I started working on this feature, and now I'm utterly fascinated. Maybe it's the weird, off-beat nature of their books — like The One-Percenters, in which a society of serial killers goes around murdering those with weak genes, who are only being kept alive because of money and medicine. Or The Zombie Cookbook, a book of "stories, poems
and recipes" about cooking with zombies, or cooking zombies. (Eww?) Mostly, though, it's the way all of their books are rated (on a scale of one to five) for sex and violence, as well as reader response in some cases. Only one book has scored a "5" for both sex and violence: The Body Cartel by Alan Spencer. Other Damnation authors? Time to raise your game.

P.S. Publishing

This British small press has put out tons of award-winning titles, especially in horror and fantasy but also in science fiction. New books are coming up by both Stephen King and his son Joe Hill. They've championed the underrated horror author Ramsey Campbell, and published great authors like Gwyneth Jones, Stephen Baxter, and Graham Joyce. They also put out Postscripts, a quarterly anthology/magazine series edited by founder Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers.

Eraserhead Press

This indy press, started by Carlton Mellick III, keeps chugging along under the steady leadership of Rose O'Keefe and her gang. And they're keeping it weird: We saw a table of Eraserhead titles at World Fantasy Con, and were blown away by the sheer Dada-ness of it all. There's Mellick's The Faggiest Vampire, which is what it sounds like. There's Shatnerquake, in which the real-life William Shatner attends a convention and has to fight all the fictional characters he's ever played. (The cover blurb goes: "William Shatner? William Shatner. William Shatner!") But perhaps the best title actually is, Rampaging Fuckers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere. How do you get any better than that? Like so many of the small presses on this list, they also put out a magazine, The Magazine Of Bizarro Fiction.

Apex Publications:

Like most of the small presses on this list, Apex also puts out a magazine — but the magazine, Apex Magazine, seems to be the biggest part of their publishing empire. They do also put out a number of horror/dark fantasy books, though, including B.J. Burrow's The Changed, which tells of a zombie outbreak from the zombie point of view. (The intriguing blurb goes, "It's not the end of the world. It's just zombies.")

Prime Books

This small press has been around since at least 2001, when they put out Catherynne M. Valente's The Labyrinth. Since then, they've put out books by KJ Bishop, Theodora Goss, Sarah Monette, Holly Phillips, Ekaterina Sedia, Jeff VanderMeer, and many more. And their books have made top ten lists from Amazon, Booklist and Publishers Weekly. Publisher Sean Wallace purchased the Prime Books imprint from Wildside Press, and relaunched it as a Recently, they've put out some great anthologies, like Federations and a forthcoming wizard-themed book (both edited by John Joseph Adams.) And they're putting out a new edition of Rudy Rucker's Ware tetralogy, with an introduction by William Gibson. A lot of the most interesting new books we've seen lately have come out from Prime. They also do their own annual Best Science Fiction & Fantasy anthology, edited by Rich Horton (full disclosure: I have a story in the new volume of this.) And they publish Fantasy magazine, which is now a webzine.

Circlet Press

Cecilia Tan started out putting out chapbooks of erotic science fiction in the early 1990s, with Telepaths Don't Need Safewords, which I still think is the best title ever. This grew into an empire of science-fictional smut, including the gay erotic SF anthology series Wired Hard and many other futuristic collections like Fetish Fantastic and Best Fantastic Erotica. These days, a lot of their titles are available at low cost as PDFs and e-reader volumes. If you've ever wanted to know how aliens and demigods practice safe and consensual BDSM, then these are the books for you.

Small Beer Press

Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link have been putting out quirky, wonderful and bizarre books, alongside their zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, for a decade now. I remember when the only places I used to see them were in the used bookstore on Newberry Street in Boston. Now Small Beer titles are among the most highly respected, and anticipated, out there. And they are constantly doing great good works: Like when Laurie J. Marks' elemental logic trilogy got canceled by its original publisher before the final volume came out, fans clamored to be able to read the conclusion — and Small Beer stepped in to save the day. Small Beer has also put out the great Interfictions anthologies of genre-defying stories, and books by Benjamin Rosenbaum, Elizabeth Hand, Joan Aiken, Greer Gilman and Poppy Z. Brite. And not to be shallow or anything, but their books are usually among the most beautifully designed out there, with arrestingly lovely covers.

Note: Before anybody pipes up in comments, we thought about including Pyr Books on this list — but they were launched as an imprint of Prometheus Books, a publisher that's been around since 1969. So through a painstaking process involving snake entrails, we deemed they weren't quite as much of an indy as the others on this list. If you disagree, blame the snake — but also, feel free to pipe up in comments. I also wound up leaving out Cemetery Dance, just becuase they've been around for 20+ years. Let us know if we missed your favorite indy press!

Top image: cover of Monstrous Affections by David Nickle, from Chizine Publications.

Oh, and here's a spoiler warning, although I'll try not to spoil anything too much.

Eclipse Three should be required reading among anyone who wants to write short stories — or, for that matter, among anybody who still clings to the hope that short fiction can be enriching. The storytelling in this volume is, for the most part, both polished and bumpy — that is, it gives you the assurance from the first sentence that you're in the hands of a storyteller who knows what s/he is doing, but it also contains lots of irregularities and odd surprises. These are almost all stories by people who know how to set up, and subvert, expectations without seeming manipulative or crass.

I had high hopes for Eclipse Three already — the first two volumes from editor Jonathan Strahan were superb (you can read my review of volume two here.) And the list of contributors for the third volume is pretty awe-inspiring, including Karen Joy Fowler, Peter S. Beagle, Maureen McHugh, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Jeffrey Ford, Nicola Griffith and Paul Di Filippo. (Not to mention a lovely, previously unpublished cover by the late Richard Powers.)

But it's actually better than I'd hoped. Pretty much all I need to say about the quality of the stories in this volume is that the Peter S. Beagle entry does not stand out. By which I mean, it's as rich and clever and epic-feeling as any Peter Beagle short story — but you don't feel as though you've stumbled on the one standout story in the book. A number of the other stories in the book are just as instantly engrossing, and have that "personal but also huge and world-encompassing" feeling that Beagle does so well.

A lot of the best stories in this volume follow a main character who encounters a stranger who opens up a bizarre world. In Beagle's story, it's a magician who meets a woman whose husband and little girl have died, and shows her how to play a trick on death. In Molly Gloss' "The Visited Man," it's a weird (and not very good) painter who befriends a man whose wife and son have also died, forcing the widower to adopt more and more animals and go in search of night ghosts. In Nnedi Okorafor's "On The Road," it's a little boy who shows up at a woman's door in Nigeria, carrying with him some kind of terrible hunger that hollows you out from the inside.

There are also a lot of stories about people's relationships with odd communities, including Fowler's opening piece, where a rebellious teenage girl gets sent to a nightmarish kind of "boot camp" where her spirit is broken (and the camp turns out to have a weird secret). Or Di Filippo's "Yes, We Have No Bananas," in which a guy gets evicted and goes to live on a houseboat in a world that we (and he) gradually realize is an alternate universe. In Pat Cadigan's "Don't Mention Madagascar," a woman gets caught up in a world of travelers who are being forever being shuttled around impossible destinations — is it the spirit world? Alternate universes? — and they form an odd sort of community.

A lot of the stories have to do with creativity and the life of the artist, including Maureen McHugh's "Useless Things," the story of a sculptor who gets robbed and finds herself hardening against the world, and Elizabeth Bear's mermaid-meets-guitarist tale. Most of all, many of these stories deal with loneliness and loss, and the strange discoveries that come to people who've given up on finding themselves in this world.

The best story in the book, though, is Nicola Griffith's "It Takes Two," the jaw-dropping story of freakish biochemistry experiments, venture capital, and a lesbian lapdance that goes much further than anyone expects. It's reminiscent of the thrilling leap-in-the-dark feeling of her novel Slow River, but feels even more intense and weird, maybe because nothing could be weirder than a strip club in Marietta, Georgia.

Though a few stories in the book didn't thrill me quite as much as the rest, and purists may protest that a few of these stories are more literary than speculative, Eclipse Three is almost entirely a great prize. I didn't realize how much my faith in the short stories had dwindled, after reading dozens of unsustaining tales, until I read these stories. It made me want to go back to writing short fiction myself, something I've been neglecting, in the vain hope that I can write something half as engrossing as the tales in this collection. [Borders]

io9: Do you see much distinction between being a musician and being a writer?

PB: Being a musician has always seemed like luxury to me, perhaps because I don't do it for a living. It's like Mark Twain's line that work consists of whatever a body's obliged to do, and play consists of what a body's not obliged to do. So I take music very seriously, but it's not my work in the same way that writing is. For me it's something of a vacation, something of a luxury. But that said, there are many similarities in the two things. There is so much about both which only has to do with structure. You have to say to yourself "Okay, this isn't working, so let's try it some other way." I've written entire stories in first person that needed to be rewritten in third person before they clicked, just the same way you might try a piece of music in a different key or on a different instrument to make it feel right. As you work you start saying to yourself "Maybe I can do that French thing of sliding back and forth between major and minor? Hey, I stole that chord progression from Brassens, so maybe I can steal this key change from Jimmy Reed?" When it comes down to doing it, there's always a right way, and I just have to find it.

Who do you enjoy listening to these days?

I'm not listening to a whole lot of music these days, for various reasons, but when I do it tends to be Django Reinhardt and people of that sort. Rex Stewart. Coleman Hawkins. Mostly older jazz.

What music inspires your writing?

I was always influenced one way or the other by French cabaret music, and jazz in general for its improvisational quality. I tend to think — I always have — in musical terms while I'm writing fiction. I'll think "This is definitely a horn section. This is definitely a string quartet." I really do think like that. I was very conscious of this when working on A Fine and Private Place. Everyone in that book was a different stringed instrument to me, and doing scenes with Michael and Mr. Rebeck and Laura and Campos, the cemetery guard, felt just like I was writing for a string quartet. I was very aware of voices and strings playing against each other.

You have cited authors like James Stephens, Lord Dunsany, James Thurber, and Edgar Pangborn as being influential to your decision to become a writer. What current authors do you admire today? In other word, read any good books lately?

There are old favorites like Charles de Lint, Patricia McKillip, and Robin McKinley. Ursula LeGuin, always. And then there are people I've never heard of before, people I've just stumbled on, like Michael Gruber. He's about my age and lives up in Seattle, and I don't know a thing more about him except that I'll read anything with his name on it. His erudition, his sense of proportion and characterization, are astonishing. Each book is different than the one before, which has always been an attraction for me since I try and do it in my own work. I was also delighted to discover, at the last convention I went to, that the mystery writer Stuart Kaminsky is a fan of mine, because I've been a great fan of his for years. Every now and then it's nice to find yourself in another mutual admiration society.

The author Robert Nathan, although successful and prolific is mainly remembered for only one novel, Portrait of Jennie. When The Last Unicorn came out he warned you that it would become "your Jennie". It seems that has been the case. Does it bug you that fans only know you for that book?

I've long since passed being tired of that particular way of looking at my work. As Robert also said, it's a lot better to be remembered for something than not to be remembered at all - he was grateful for Jennie. But this is an issue that doesn't take up a lot of my time. I like it when people discover the book from the movie, and I like it when people discover others of my books from that one. There's no way to predict it, and absolutely no sense in staying up nights with it. I just try and make the books different from each other because that's what is important to me.

Have you gotten a bit sick of unicorns, or do they still mean something wonderful to you?

It's a funny thing. I never did imagine I would take them on again, for a lot of reasons. But then I went and wrote a couple of stories involving unicorns - or things that call themselves unicorns, anyway - one of which, "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros," is my own favorite among my shorter pieces of fiction. And I wrote a YA book called The Unicorn Sonata which utterly vanished when the publisher went under, but which I'm going to bring back as a four-book series, probably starting next year. So they were still there, in a lesser kind of way. Then "Two Hearts" came along in 2005 and my unicorn, the unicorn, you might say, was back in my life. This one has inevitably led me to another novel, which will follow up on Sooz, to see what happens to her starting when she turns 17. That's how I find out about my characters: I write about them. There's an old saying in various languages that goes "You want to give God a good giggle? Make a plan." The Germans simply say "Man plans, God laughs." So I don't make plans that way any more. I have certain things I've agreed to do, and certain things I feel I have to do, but beyond those I never know what's going to come next, or what I'll be doing. Over the years I've usually been very surprised.

Could you comment about your current legal dispute with Granada Media over the animated film of The Last Unicorn ?

Very simply, making this as open and shut as I can, by the terms of my contract Granada owes me 5% of the profits from The Last Unicorn. Now, their first reaction when we asked to be paid back in 2003 was to claim that they didn't have to pay me anything because no one told them there were any active contracts when they bought the film. That was legally meaningless, and we told them so. Their next position was that they had bought the film out of bankruptcy, which meant they were not obligated to pay me anything I might have been owed from before their purchase. This is true enough, but not to any particular point, since of course I wasn't asking them to pay me for anything prior to their purchase. Just for my proper share of what they'd made. At that point they went silent and stonewalled until we posted the whole controversy on the web in 2005, asking for fan support. After they started getting complaint letters and faxes, in 2006 they came to yet a third position - that old Hollywood standby of claiming that the film was still in the red. In fact, their official line is that due to various accounting and contractual matters, the movie version of The Last Unicorn — which cost only $3 million to make in the early ‘80s — is now somehow $15 million in the hole, 27 years later. According to them it has never made a profit, despite all these years of good business, despite current cable deals in multiple countries, despite the fact that over 1.5 million DVDs have been sold worldwide in the past five years. Right now, 8,000 new DVDs of the film sell every week in North America through major retailers, and I get nothing from any of them. Not a cent. Only the copies people buy through Conlan Press make any money for me at all. It's rather frustrating. We're not done with the issue, though, and sooner or later I believe I'll win what I'm due. Regarding some things I'm very stubborn, and I've certainly got the facts and the law on my side.

I really enjoyed your recent stories inspired by your Jewish upbringing in the Bronx. Are you planning any more pieces in that vein?

It sounds like you're talking about "The Rabbi's Hobby," in Eclipse Two, and "Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel," which came out in Strange Roads from Dreamhaven Books and is also in my latest collection, We Never Talk About My Brother. I didn't plan to do those at all, it's just the way they came into my head. And they were certainly fun to write, but I don't think you should expect to see any more rabbis in my work because I was not raised particularly observant, was never Bar Mitzvahed, and didn't know any rabbis on what you might call a professional basis. Well, maybe one more...my business manager told me once that the autocorrect in Word had changed his mistyping of "The Rabbi's Hobby" into "The Rabbi's Holiday," and that tickled me because the titular rabbi's name, Tuvim, means "holiday" in Hebrew. So I might yet write one about Rabbi "Holiday's" holiday. We'll see. If you liked those stories you might also like a series of seasonally-themed podcasts I've been doing for the Green Man Review. They aren't about being Jewish, but they are set in the Bronx of my childhood, and feature me and my friends from back then. One of those - -"The Stickball Witch" — shows up in print for the first time in Brother. There are four more, and sometime later this year I hope to see them collected in a single volume called Four Years, Five Seasons.

Would you consider doing a story using the Golem legend?

As a matter of fact, there's a novel I've been thinking about — the working title is Famous Monsters — that will feature a mild-mannered, very gentlemanly English actor who may very well be the Golem. Or my version, anyway. I'll have to see how it comes out.

Would that English actor be at all based on William Henry Pratt?

Yes. For some years now I've been thinking about doing a book based on the real-life friendship between Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi. Lon Chaney, Jr., and Peter Lorre...or, as they were actually named, William Henry Pratt, Béla Blaskó, Creighton Chaney, and László Löwenstein. None of them were really what they seemed; they were all so much more complex and interesting than the monstrous characters they played. And I got the notion that maybe there was yet another level to the four of them, and that's what I've been exploring ever since. There's a tremendous amount of research to be done on this one. And of course it takes place in Los Angeles at the end of the 1930s, right on the brink of World War Two. That's Raymond Chandler/Nathaniel West territory, they really own that, so I will have to try and write about that time as if I've never read either of them.

What can you tell us about some of your upcoming projects, especially novels like Summerlong , Sweet Lightning, and I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons?

They are all at various stages of work and rework. Summerlong needs one more cleanup pass, and some major rewriting of the last two chapters. I plan on being done with that by the end of April, so Conlan Press can bring out the hardcover this year, to be followed by a trade paperback edition from Tachyon Publications in 2010. This one has been a long time coming — I originally wrote it for Simon & Schuster back in 2001 and 2002, but the editor bounced my second draft because I didn't follow any of his suggestions. He meant well, to be sure, but they were all terrible suggestions. Not quite on par with insisting I put in sharks and terrorists — or terrorist sharks — but similarly unaware of what the story was actually meant to be doing. This one is fantasy of the sort that literary critics tend to call "magical realism," and it is set in and around modern-day Seattle.

I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons is completely different, and something of a rollercoaster: it starts out mostly lighthearted and funny, but turns rather dark and scary in the middle and in the end, well...I thought I'd never come back to playing with kings and princes and princesses, and certainly I never thought I would ever write an entire novel about dragons. But this story was too much fun to turn my back on. I hope readers will like it.

Sweet Lightning is the farthest from completion, because it is so personal for me. I'll be working on this one for a while. It's both a baseball fantasy — I love baseball, I always have — and a love letter to the Pittsburgh I discovered when I went to college there in the mid-1950s.

After those three are out of the way I've got the maybe-golem book to consider, the full sequel to The Last Unicorn, the four-volume Unicorn Sonata series...and those are just the novels on the to-do list. There are non-fiction books and children's books I'm working on, new poetry and song lyrics, several collections, old books to revise and bring back into print, maybe some theatre, lots of stories — over thirty finished in the last two years, including three new Schmendrick stories. I'm still not quite sure how I happened to become a prolific short fiction writer at my advanced and supposedly set-in-my-ways age, but there they are, with more on the way. And I'm definitely getting back to occasionally performing live as a guitarist and singer, after having so much fun doing shows with my old friend Phil Sigunick in upstate New York last summer. As George Burns liked to joke, "I can't die, I'm booked!"

The simple fact is that I've been working at this for over 50 years, and I'm still not getting it right. But I do think I'm getting closer.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to Peter S. Beagle as Christopher Hsiang. He is deeply grateful for Mr. Beagle's time and that of Connor Cochran, his business manager. Chris really looks forward to reading Famous Monsters - squee!

Beagle is most well known for two classic novels written at the very beginning of his career, neither of which have ever been out of print. The Last Unicorn is probably his most famous and beloved, but I feel A Fine and Private Place is the better book-a truly timeless classic. He continues to attract faithful fans with his wit, charm and powerful writing in novels like Tansin, The Innkeeper's Song, and the collection The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche . Did I mention he also wrote the "Sarek" episode of Star Trek: TNG? Yeah, that one.

Reading the recent "Rabbi's Holiday" in Eclipse Two (Night Shade Books) I thought, "Wow, the guy's just getting better!" It would stand to reason that any talented author would naturally improve with age like fine wine. Sadly, this is not always the case; every reader knows that particular heartbreak. But Beagle will not disappoint you. The nineteen-year-old summer camp counselor who wrote A Fine and Private Place has been at his craft for half a century now and the work has really paid off.

"Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel" is inspired by Beagle's own New York Jewish childhood touched by a divine presence both quirky and commanding. The wonderfully drawn family portraits are as warm and satisfying as a big plate of latkes. A companion piece to the aforementioned "Rabbi's Holiday", I adore these.

The narrative voice shifts effortlessly on the title track "We Never Talk About My Brother". A blue-collar regular Joe has a family secret and a very good reason for keeping it. Visceral? There's a line on the eighteenth page that felt like a blow to my solar plexus. After that it just gets intense, like Kingdom Come intense.

"The Tale of Junko and Sayuri": Reminiscent of both Neil Gaiman's Dream Hunters from Sandman and Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, it uses the common folktale motif of the Animal Wife with a nice twist. Rediscover that uneasy feeling when the person you love turns out to be not who what they seem.

"King Pelles the Sure" wants to give his happy prosperous nation the only thing it has ever lacked, a war. This quick cappricio keeps a somber counterpoint to create a great anti-war fable. There is in no way any allegory of any recent historical events. It should be added to Elementary school curricula everywhere.

Medical science is baffled by "The Last and Only, or Mr. Moscowitz Becomes French". With no where else to turn, a middle-aged couple must come to grips with the husband's complete and inexorable slide into foreignness. An inventively original farce that is also a deep commentary on identity and loss.

I couldn't help but think of Dan Ackroyd while reading "Spook", especially his role in Ghostbusters and as Leonard Pinth-Garnell on SNL. It has vengeance from beyond the grave and the Worst Poems to be found in the most foetid, blackest pits of the English Language. Guess which one is more horrifying.

"The Stickball Witch" returns back to the old neighborhood and that one house all the kids were scared of. This and the next story are previously unpublished. To my mind they are the weakest in the book being merely good. The description of the old lady here is picture-perfect.

"By Moonlight" a haunted man recounts his time in the land of Faery. Bittersweet and authentic to the period and the classic folklore, this piece is satisfying but not terribly original. It's more like an old song everyone in the pub sings along to.

As the first story is told by a young boy it is fitting that the narrator of "Chandail" is an old storyteller. Lal recounts her relationship with a sea monster with uncanny powers and with her own painful memories. This is set in the same world as Beagle's novel The Innkeeper's Song. I have not read it but is definitely going on my list.

The first half of the collection are the strongest of the stories but each one is a beautiful song, each with it's own voice and tone. Beagle plays the classic themes of love and death, sacrifice and self-discovery like a master. Never clichéd, he pulls out new riffs and vamps on the expected conventions of modern fantasy, even the ones he helped create in the first place. With just the right notes he can describe an entire room, the people in it and the mood, all in a few perfect sentences. Pure poetry. Beagle is an American bard: He makes the tough guys weep and all the girls sigh.

We Never Talk About My Brother via Tachyon Books

Grey_Area is known among the unicorns as Christopher Hsiang. He means you no harm - he's just here for the books.