Here are original stories that straddle the borderline between "fantasy" and "mainstream" fiction, stories both bright and dark in tone (without straying into the realm of horror fiction). Sometimes set in the contemporary or historical world, sometimes pure fantasy or an imagined "history," these are striking, fresh, finely crafted works that demonstrate the best the short story form has to offer. Among the authors included are Delia Sherman, Peter Beagle, Greer Gilman, Paul Di Filippo, Jeffrey Ford, Gregory Maguire, and Lucius Shepard.

"In this all-original anthology, the editors, longtime partners in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, bring together mostly new fantasy writers, most of them contributors to previous Datlow/Windling books and perhaps forming a distinct 'school.' Call it American magic realism. In most stories, a departure from (usually) contemporary reality is taken for granted, with no one asking questions or expressing wonder. In Jeffrey Ford's 'The Night Whiskey,' a small town holds a lottery to see who gets to drink magic wine made from a bush that only grows in corpses. The drunken winners are then ritually knocked out of the trees into which they climb while communing with ancestral ghosts. Why? It merely is. While Ford can make this approach work, the book's weakness is that many of the stories are poetic at the expense of sense. There is, however, an outstanding opener by Delia Sherman, plus good work by Peter S. Beagle, Lucius Shepard, Catherynne Valente and Paul Di Filippo." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"In this all-original anthology, the editors, longtime partners in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, bring together mostly new fantasy writers, most of them contributors to previous Datlow/Windling books and perhaps forming a distinct 'school.' Call it American magic realism. In most stories, a departure from (usually) contemporary reality is taken for granted, with no one asking questions or expressing wonder. In Jeffrey Ford's 'The Night Whiskey,' a small town holds a lottery to see who gets to drink magic wine made from a bush that only grows in corpses. The drunken winners are then ritually knocked out of the trees into which they climb while communing with ancestral ghosts. Why? It merely is. While Ford can make this approach work, the book's weakness is that many of the stories are poetic at the expense of sense. There is, however, an outstanding opener by Delia Sherman, plus good work by Peter S. Beagle, Lucius Shepard, Catherynne Valente and Paul Di Filippo." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"[O]ne of the year's best showcases of fantastic fiction....Anthologies often contain one or two stories manifestly superior to the rest, but that is not the case here. Most of the fiction in Salon Fantastique is of a very high caliber..." Paul Witcover, SciFi.com

Ellen Datlow was editor of Sci Fiction, the multi award- winning fiction area of SciFi.com, for almost six years. She was fiction editor of Omni for over seventeen years and has worked with an array of writers, including Susanna Clarke, Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. LeGuin, Bruce Sterling, Peter Straub, Jonathan Carroll, George R. R. Martin, William Gibson, Jeffrey Ford, Kelly Link, Joyce Carol Oates, Cory Doctorow, and others. Her most recent anthologies include The Dark, The Green Man, and The Faery Reel (the latter two with Terri Windling). She's been co-editing The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror for twenty years. Datlow has won seven World Fantasy Awards, two Bram Stoker Awards, three Hugo Awards, three Locus Awards, and the International Horror Guild Award, for her editing. She lives in New York City.

Terri Windling is an editor, artist, essayist, and the author of books for both children and adults. She has won seven World Fantasy Awards, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Mythopoeic Award for Novel of the Year. She has edited over thirty anthologies of magical fiction, many of them in collaboration with Ellen Datlow. She was the fantasy editor of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror annual volumes for sixteen years, and continues to work as a consulting editor for the Tor Books fantasy line. As a writer, Windling has published mythic novels for adults and young adults, picture books for children, poetry, essays, and articles on fairy tale history, myth, and mythic arts. As an artist, her paintings have been exhibited at museums and galleries across the U.S., the U.K., and France. Windling is the director of the Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts, and co-editor, with Midori Snyder, of its quarterly webzine: The Journal of Mythic Arts. She lives in Devon, England, and winters at an arts retreat in the Arizona desert.