"Nevertheless, She Persisted" Anthology Table of Contents

Book View Cafe's Mindy Klasky has edited an anthology, Nevertheless, She Persisted. Here's the Table of Contents (with my historical fantasy story about Dona Gracia Nasi). Release date is August 8, 2017.

What an amazing lineup!

“Daughter of Necessity” by Marie Brennan
“Sisters” by Leah Cutter
“Unmasking the Ancient Light” by Deborah J. Ross
“Alea Iacta Est” by Marissa Doyle
“How Best to Serve” from A Call to Arms by P.G. Nagle
“After Eden” by Gillian Polack
“Reset” by Sara Stamey
“A Very, Wary Christmas” by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel
“Making Love” by Brenda Clough
“Den of Iniquity” by Irene Radford
“Digger Lady” by Amy Sterling Casil
“Tumbling Blocks” by Mindy Klasky
“The Purge” by Jennifer Stevenson
“If It Ain’t Broke” by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
“Chataqua” by Nancy Jane Moore
“Bearing Shadows” by Dave Smeds
“In Search of Laria” by Doranna Durgin
“Tax Season” by Judith Tarr
“Little Faces” by Vonda N. McIntyre

Glory in the Skies

Today's "Astronomy Picture of the Day" is so beautiful, so uplifting to my spirits, I cannot resist posting it here. For all the troubles on our small globe, the universe is an awesome place. Often I need reminding of the scale of things, "this too shall pass," and that there is always beauty and wonder to be found if we but lift our eyes.

About 170,000 light-years across, this galaxy is enormous, almost twice the size of our own Milky Way galaxy. ... Its core is dominated by light from cool yellowish stars. Along its grand spiral arms are the blue colors of hotter, young stars mixed with obscuring dust lanes and pinkish star forming regions.

Short Book Reviews: Urban Fantasy Circa 1991

Street Magic, by Michael Reaves, Tor 1991. This isn’t a new book, as you can see by the date. In fact,

I believe it’s the first urban fantasy I read, along the lines of “elves in Manhattan.” In this case, the city is San Francisco, but it could be any big, grimy, noisy city that draws runaways, abandoned kids, and the disillusioned. It’s a fairly short book, and by today’s standards quite simple, but in its time, the tropes were sufficiently new to stand on their own without an overly elaborate plot. I tried to step aside from the urban fantasy of the last 15 years and re-read it with fresh eyes. The characters and elements that appealed to me then still do. The ones that didn’t (like the street kid to whom magical creatures are drawn) still don’t; however, what was once annoying I now see as a not-so-successful exploration of a literary shorthand we now take for granted and that has not weathered the years well.

My favorite characters included an elderly woman bookstore owner (of course!) and the photographer who once glimpsed a door into Faerie (at Muir Woods, of all places – where I visited many times as a teen and college age student, hiking in the “back way” from my parents’ house – well, redwood grove and magic do go together, or so I have always thought), botched his chance to step through that door, and now has descended into a haze of alcohol and regret. He’s not a major character and doesn’t drive the plot, but the way he grapples with his yearning to find Faerie again (and this time, seize the chance he missed before) in conflict with living an ordinary, mortal life in an ordinary, mortal world touched me deeply. Isn’t that what we all do – try to balance and integrate the unrealistic, idealistic dreaming and the humdrum, hoping to forge lives that in some way connect and nurture the miraculous?

The verdict: If you haven’t read it, do take a look. It’s a short book and moves right along, and even after all these years has something to offer, especially in the secondary characters. If you missed it and you love urban fantasy, I commend this historical perspective on the genre.

Short Fiction Sales News

I've just sold two pieces of short fiction to exciting projects.

The first, "Unmasking the Ancient Light," is to Nevertheless, She Persisted, an anthology edited by Mindy Klasky, to be released from Book View Cafe on August 8, 2017. It's a reprint from Ancient Enchantresses, (ed. Kathleen M. Massie-Ferch and Martin H. Greenberg, 1995), and is based on the life of Dona Gracia Nasi, whose family fled Spain after the expulsion, ran one of the largest spice trading firms in Europe, set up a Jewish "underground railroad" from Venice, and eventually established one of the first attempts at a Jewish homeland at Tiberias.

The second is an original story, "The Girl from Black Point Rock," to Sword and Sorceress 32, ed. Elisabeth Waters. More about it later.

Short Book Review: A Post-Apocalyptic Midwife

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (The Road to Nowhere, Book 1) by Meg Elison, 47North. Just as I finished reading this book, I listened to a radio program on the role of dystopic literature in today’s political landscape. The books referenced were generally those so well known they had been made into films ( The Hunger Games, Divergence, The Handmaid’s Tale). The context was one of social commentary and political warning. Meg Elison’s Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, although depicting a future as grim as the others, focuses instead of a human story. There’s no explanation for the plague that wipes out most of humankind, or why most men turn into rapists bent on enslaving women; that’s not the heart of the story. Via alternating journal entries and narrative sections, an unnamed woman – a nurse midwife working in a hospital -- chronicles her own personal journey through a landscape of dead people and dying cities, caught between the desolation of being utterly alone and the peril posed by the few other survivors. As she survives one crisis after another, she gains in wisdom and insight. No matter how lonely she is, she refuses to sacrifice her hard-won independence – both of body and of spirit. The writing is clear and lucid, its simplicity a perfect vehicle for the power of the emotional arc. In the end, the seeds of trust and kindness only partly glimpsed at the beginning of her harrowing tale come to fruition in a thoroughly satisfying way.