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Fantasy Magazine, June 2008

In honor of the wedding season (or perhaps despite it) Fantasy Magazine’s June offerings explore romantic love—love lost, love found, and “love” most deadly.
June’s first story is “On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves” by Peter M. Ball. “Everyone has a past and you do your best to pretend it doesn’t matter,” Deacon, […]

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Fantasy Magazine, May 2008

Fantasy Magazine Online delivers four strong stories in its May, 2008, offerings.
In “The Stolen Word” by Lisa Mantchev, a foul-tempered and incorrigible child is sold by her mother to a wandering peddler, with the promise that he’ll not bring her back “evermore.” But the peddler is in for more than he bargained for with this […]

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Warrior Wisewoman, edited by Roby James

In the introduction to Warrior Wisewoman, editor Roby James explains that the anthology is meant to offer stories with strong female protagonists—not characters that could as easily be male as female, but strong women, whose gender informs their actions but does not define them. It seeks to show women protagonists who are both strong and […]

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Interzone, #215, April 2008

As befits a springtime issue, Interzone #215 offers six stories of transition, death, and new life (of one sort or another).
In “The Endling,” Jamie Barras introduces a host of interesting characters in a complex situation of interlocking fates. Wright is the last member of a human space colony taken captive by the Melzemi, aliens […]

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Sporty Spec: Games of the Fantastic, edited by Karen A. Romanko

As its title suggests, Sporty Spec: Games of the Fantastic, edited by Karen A. Romanko, endeavors to bring something of the fantastic to stories centered on sports and games. It largely succeeds in this, with 26 very short stories—none over five pages long—and several similarly themed poems.
In reading this anthology, I was reminded of […]

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Jabberwocky 3, edited by Sean Wallace

The third volume in Prime Books’ Jabberwocky series is definitely fantasy and tends toward the dark and literary. Bookended by epigraphs from Oscar Wilde’s Salome, Jabberwocky 3 has the air of inevitable tragedy, of a slow encroachment of vines that swallow up the white palace, piercing it with blood-red thorns.
This mood is established and upheld […]

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Sails & Sorcery: Tales of Nautical Fantasy, edited by W.H. Horner

In his introduction to Sails & Sorcery: Tales of Nautical Fantasy, edited by W.H. Horner, Lawrence C. Connolly contends that the mystery and glory are in the quest, not the treasure. This may well be true, and there are some fine adventures to be had in this volume, but the treasures are, at times, buried […]

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Hebrew Punk by Lavie Tidhar

Lavie Tidhar concocts a fantastical stew from disparate elements in Hebrew Punk, in which a Dream Team of Hebraic antiheroes breaks into a blood bank, a Jewish vampire meets Nazi werewolves, past and future civilizations ebb and flow through the hills and valleys of East Africa, and an immortal Tzaddik guardian falls prey to […]

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