When she is still very small, Mary meets Lanmo, a shining golden snake, who becomes her very best friend.The snake visits Mary many times, he sees her city change, become sadder as bombs drop and war creeps in. He sees Mary and her family leave their home, he sees her grow up and he sees her fall in love. But Lanmo knows that the day will come when he can no longer visit Mary, when his destiny will break them apart, and he wonders whether having a friend can possibly be worth the pain of knowing you will lose them.From one of Britain's most gifted and celebrated writers, The Little Snake is a magical and deeply moving fable about the journey we all take through life, about love and family, about war and resilience, about how we live in this world, and how we leave it.

    New issues are released on the first Tuesday of every month. EDITORIAL Words from the Editor-in-Chief—Jason Sizemore FICTION A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies — Alix Harrow Work, and Ye Shall Eat — Walker McKnight Ghost Marriage — P. Djeli Clark Excerpt: Return to the Lost Level — Brian Keene NONFICTION Interview with Alix Harrow — Andrea Johnson Interview with Cover Artist Justin Adams — Russell Dickerson A Discussion with Tal M. Klein, Author of The Punch Escrow — Lesley Conner COLUMNS Between the Lines with Laura Zats and Erik Hane Page Advice with Mallory O'Meara and Brea Grant

    Alas, in the infinite nexus of the universe which is New York, trouble is a hard thing to avoid, and when a rivalry between the city's two queens threatens to turn to all out war, M finds himself thrust in thrust in the unfamiliar position of hero. Now, to keep the apocalypse from descending on the Big Apple, he’ll have to call in every favor, waste every charm, and blow every spell he's ever acquired - he might even have to get out of bed before noon.Enter a world of Wall Street wolves, slumming scenesters, desperate artists, drug-induced divinities, pocket steam-punk universes, hipster zombies, and phantom subway lines. Because the city never sleeps, but is always dreaming.

    But when a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, she’s forced to take on her least favourite kind of job – missing persons.Being hired by reclusive music producer Odi Huron to find a teenybop pop star should be her ticket out of Zoo City, the festering slum where the criminal underclass and their animal companions live in the shadow of hell’s undertow.Instead, it catapults Zinzi deeper into the maw of a city twisted by crime and magic, where she’ll be forced to confront the dark secrets of former lives – including her own.

    As recently as the 17th century, a farm-hand encountered them upon a Welsh hillside and was almost 'danced to death', and a century later, babies were still being stolen and replaced with 'changelings'. Even the finest brains are not immune to metahominid influence. When Sherlock Holmes' brilliant creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fell victim, they made him believe that photographs of cut-out paper figures were images of real fairies. In short, the metahominids - traditionally called fairies - used Conan Doyle's fame and reputation to prove they do not exist.Within their traditional haunts of hill fort, woodland and barrow, these creatures are dangerous enough; but now, like urban foxes, they are abandoning the countryside to infest our city spaces. They prey upon us within our own territory - and modern life offers us no protection. Our unwillingness to believe in these 'other men' leaves us wide open to attack. They ramp up the trance music in our clubs, leaving us unable to resist dancing to certain tracks, and woe betide the young mother who suddenly realises her baby isn’t hers… no one will believe her. Thus they move amongst us, still destroying lives as they always have done, yet now, suddenly, in greater numbers than ever before…As this centuries old, covert war heats up, it falls to a shambling figure known only as 'D', and his pitifully underfunded department, to keep us safe - and ignorant of the nightmares that lurk, hidden in the every day world that we call 'reality'. A contemporary British fantasy, The Last Changeling reveals the hidden story behind present day real people, historical figures, and true events.

    Magical, tantalizing, and sensual, The Mistress of Spices is the story of Tilo, a young woman born in another time, in a faraway place, who is trained in the ancient art of spices and ordained as a mistress charged with special powers.  Once fully initiated in a rite of fire, the now immortal Tilo--in the gnarled and arthritic body of an old woman--travels through time to Oakland, California, where she opens a shop from which she administers spices as curatives to her customers.  An unexpected romance with a handsome stranger eventually forces her to choose between the supernatural life of an immortal and the vicissitudes of modern life.  Spellbinding and hypnotizing, The Mistress of Spices is a tale of joy and sorrow and one special woman's magical powers.

    Lynn stands as a groundbreaking author of fantasy and science fiction. Her stories weave richly drawn characters and complex scenes of daily life into the intricate tapestry of speculative fiction. But beyond her technical skill, Lynn has changed the landscape of fantasy writing as one of the first authors to incorporate themes of gender and gay relationships into her work. Importantly, these themes are not part of the fantastic story line but simply of the unremarkable, normal relationships around which the fantasy occurs. This collection of Lynn’s early short stories serves as a wonderful introduction to her influential work. Soaring emotions, eloquent prose, and fully realized worlds are truly a joy to become lost within. That explains why the namesake short story “The Woman Who Loved the Moon” won Lynn one of her two World Fantasy Awards.With The Woman Who Loved the Moon and Other Stories, readers will delight in an author whose work George R. R. Martin has described as “the sort of fantasy we don’t see enough of: lyrical and literate, and a treat from the first page to the last.”

    Despite pulling his biggest feat yet by capturing a high god for a renowned Eko wizard, David knows his job’s bad luck. He’s proved right when the wizard conjures a legion of Taboos—feral godling-child hybrids—to seize Lagos for himself. To fix his mistake and keep Lagos standing, David teams up with his foster wizard, the high god’s twin sister and a speech-impaired Muslim teenage girl to defeat the wizard.

    As war erupts and their families are torn apart, they fear they may disappear into the unwritten pages of history. Using the sword and the pen, the body and the voice, they struggle not just to survive, but to make history.Sofia Samatar is the author of the Crawford, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy award-winning novel A Stranger in Olondria. She also received the John W. Campbell Award. She has written for the Guardian, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and many other publications. She lives in California. Her website is sofiasamatar.com.Praise for A Stranger in Olondria:"A book about the love of books. Her sentences are intoxicating and one can easily be lost in their intricacy. . . . Samatar's beautifully written book is one that will be treasured by book lovers everywhere."— Raul M. Chapa, BookPeople, Austin, Texas

    Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with familiar instincts, with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt. This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A woman might give birth to a – well what?

    Collected in a mini-book format, here--for the first time in print--are six of her quirky, wry, engaging best:In -The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model, - aliens reveal the terrible truth about how humans were created--and why we'll never discover aliens.-As Good as New- is a brilliant twist on the tale of three wishes, set after the end of the world. -Intestate- is about a family reunion in which some attendees aren't quite human anymore--but they're still family.-The Cartography of Sudden Death- demonstrates that when you try to solve a problem with time travel, you now have two problems.-Six Months, Three Days- is the story of the love affair between a man who can see the one true foreordained future, and a woman who can see all the possible futures. They're both right, and the story won the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novelette.And -Clover, - exclusively written for this collection, is a coda to All the Birds in the Sky, answering the burning question of what happened to Patricia's cat.

    Now, after his death, his sons have taken up his work. But what they discover is beyond what they could have expected. For the Wood is a realm where myths gain flesh and blood, tapping primal fears and desires subdued through the millennia. A realm where love and beauty haunt your dreams -- and may drive you insane. Mythago Wood won the World Fantasy Award on its first publication in 1984, and secured Robert Holdstock's reputation as one of the major fantasy writers of our time. Now it returns to print in America for the first time in nearly a decade.

    He was deep in a dream of leaping and flying when he felt an unusual tingling in his whiskers. Fritti Tailchaser, hunterchild of the Folk, came suddenly awake and sniffed the air. Ears pricked and whiskers flared straight, he sifted the evening breeze. Nothing unusual. Then what had awakened him? Pondering, he splayed his claws and began a spine-limbering stretch that finally ended at the tip of his reddish tail.”Join Tailchaser on his magical quest to rescue his catfriend Hushpad on a quest that will take him all the way to cat hell and beyond.

    But Uiziya now seeks her aunt Benesret in order to learn the final weave, although the price for knowledge may be far too dear to pay.Among the Khana, women travel in caravans to trade, while men remain in the inner quarter as scholars. A nameless man struggles to embody Khana masculinity, after many years of performing the life of a woman, trader, wife, and grandmother.As the past catches up to the nameless man, he must choose between the life he dreamed of and Uiziya, and Uiziya must discover how to challenge a tyrant, and weave from deaths that matter.Set in R. B. Lemberg's beloved Birdverse.

    An elderly lady with Charles Bonnet syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. A woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire, and a crime committed long ago is revenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion-year-old stromatolite.In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood ventures into the shadowland earlier explored by fabulists and concoctors of dark yarns such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Daphne du Maurier and Arthur Conan Doyle - and also by herself, in her award-winning novel Alias Grace. In Stone Mattress, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.