In her long-awaited debut story collection, dark, lush, and spellbinding short fiction you will find unexpected detours, dangerous magic, and even more dangerous women.Briar, bodyguard for a body-stealing sorceress, discovers her love for Rose, whose true soul emerges only once a week. An apprentice witch seeks her freedom through betrayal, the bones of the innocent, and a meticulously-plotted spell. In a world powered by crystal skulls, a warrior returns to save China from invasion by her jealous ex. A princess runs away from an arranged marriage, finding family in a strange troupe of traveling actors at the border of the kingdom’s deep, dark woods.Concluding with a gorgeous full-length novella, Marjorie Liu’s first short fiction collection is an unflinching sojourn into her thorny tales of love, revenge, and new beginnings.Sympathy for the bones --The briar and the rose --The light and the fury --The last dignity of man --Where the heart lives --After the blood --Tangleroot palace

    From an Imperial Dragon in Toronto's Chinatown, to a heavy-metal retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk, to the realization that the ancient gods are one highly dysfunctional family, Huff skews our world slightly sideways. These seven stories with brand new introductions by the author, remind us that the weird and the wonderful is all around us if we only bother to look.

    from the author of the bestselling Ancient Future.Featuring characters inspired by her closest friends and relations, traci delivers a series of spine-tingling stories alongside autobiographical snippets that give fascinating insights into her life and the real-life personalities who inspire the characters for her fiction (including the fiesty model for Ancient Future's tory Alexander!)Enter a world of mystery and hauntings fair and foul .

    For it is rumored there is a forest where the fae has become so powerful that it devours all who enter it, and he means to test its power.This novella prequel to C.S. Friedman's bestselling Coldfire Trilogy (Black Sun Rising, When True Night Falls, Crown of Shadows) offers fans of the series a tale of Tarrant's secret history, while new readers will enjoy a chilling introduction to one of High Fantasy's most fascinating—and deadly—worlds.

    The stories traverse the magical and the mundane, where supernatural beings are indistinguishable from their mortal counterparts in their complexity and complicity.