After learning of his ancestral ties to Dormia, a hidden kingdom in the Ural Mountains whose inhabitants possess the ancient power of "wakeful sleeping," twelve-year-old Alfonso sets out on a mission to save the kingdom from destruction, discovering secrets that lurk in his own sleep.

Snub is a young female gorilla, somewhat jealous because her mother is occupied with a new baby, curious of the world around her, a world that is being reshaped by shaking ground and mountains that bleed fire, and most terrifyingly by a new form of predator that walks on two legs; when her mother is killed Snub finds herself in charge of her baby brother--and accompanied by one of the not-gorillas, a very young female who has been orphaned by the...

When the soldier she planned to marry at WWII's end writes to tell her he's in love with a woman in England, Francine Howard seeks a fresh start in the Appalachian Mountains, training to be a nurse midwife for the Frontier Nursing Service. Deeply affected by the horrors he witnessed at war, Ben Locke has never thought further ahead than making it home to Kentucky. When their paths intersect, it's immediately clear that they are from different worlds...

Fourteen stories on relations between men and women. In one story, an estranged couple find common cause in their dislike of their marriage counsellor, in another, a wife patiently waits for the right moment to reveal to her husband she knows of his infidelity.

"1890: When Desiderya Lopez, The Sleepy Prophet, finds an abandoned infant on the banks of an arroyo, she recognizes something in his spirit and brings him home. Pidre will go on to become a famous showman in the Anglo West whose main act, Simodecea, is Pidre's fearless, sharpshooting wife, who wrangles bears as part of his show. 1935: Luz "Little Light" Lopez and her brother Diego work the carnival circuit in downtown Denver. Luz, is a tea leaf reader,...

For the inimitable Lee Smith, place is paramount. For forty-five years, her fiction has lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South. But never before has she written her own story. Set deep in the mountains of Virginia, the Grundy of Lee Smiths youth was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters, and her daddys dimestore. It was in that dimestore -- listening to customers and inventing adventures...

A collection of stories and poems about faeries in all parts of the world by a variety of authors. Faeries, or creatures like them, can be found in almost every culture the world over -- benevolent and terrifying, charming and exasperating, shifting shape from country to country, story to story, and moment to moment. In The Faery Reel, acclaimed anthologists Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling have asked some of today's finest writers of fantastic fiction...