Of Two Minds

Today is the release date for Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, edited by Ekaterina Sedia. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy a few weeks ago, and I’ve been enjoying it a lot.

Paper Cities is an eclectic collection of fantastic stories that are about, obviously enough, cities. While that makes them urban fantasy, these stories don’t fall within that part of the genre most recently popularized by writers like Jim Butcher, Kim Harrison or Kelley Armstrong. Instead, they use a broader definition of the term that results in some wildly different settings and a variety of writing styles.

There are outstanding stories from some of my favorite writers, such as Jay Lake’s “Promises: A Tale of the City Imperishable” (a story set in the City Imperishable from his novel Trial of Flowers) and Hal Duncan’s “The Tower of Morning’s Bones” (a story using the mythology of Vellum and Ink), excellent work from notables like Ben Peek (“The Funeral, Ruined”) and Forrest Aguirre (“Andretto Walks the King’s Way”), and great efforts from authors I’d never read before, including “Sammarynda Deep” by Cat Sparks and “They Would Only Be Roads” by Darin C. Bradley.

Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy is sure to find it’s way onto plenty of “Best of” lists for 2008, and I highly recommend it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 8:47 pm by Michael and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.