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In this thrilling collection of original stories some of today's hottest paranormal authors delight, thrill and captivate readers with otherworldly tales of magic and mischief. In Jim Butcher's "Curses" Harry Dresden investigates how to lift a curse laid by the Fair Folk on the Chicago Cubs. In Patricia Briggs' "Fairy Gifts," a vampire is called home by magic to save the Fae who freed him from a dark curse. In Melissa Marr's "Guns for the Dead," the newly dead Frankie Lee seeks a job in the afterlife on the wrong side of the law. In Holly Black's "Noble Rot," a dying rock star discovers that the young woman who brings him food every day has some strange appetites of her own.
Featuring original stories from 20 authors, this dark, captivating, fabulous and fantastical collection is not to be missed!
- Sales Rank: #487322 in Books
- Published on: 2011-07-05
- Released on: 2011-07-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.14" h x 1.01" w x 5.50" l, .96 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 560 pages
Review
“This anthology of short fiction affords a superb sampling of urban fantasy, that popular sf/fantasy subgenre defined in the book's introduction (which, in all of three pages, is a welcome and helpful, to say nothing of articulate, definition of this subgenre) as a combination of the "often-dark edge of city living with enticing worlds of magic"--with an urban landscape being absolutely crucial to the story. To put it another way (as also expressed in the introduction, that is), "where the story takes place should matter, in some way, to the story." The headliner piece, by virtue of its placement first in the collection's presentation and the name recognition of the author, is "Curses," by Jim Butcher, creator of the urban-fantasy series Dresden Files. It opens like a noir detective story--"Most of my cases are pretty tame"--but by page 2, we see this is Dresden Files fiction as well. The premise is a riot: the famous curse upon the Chicago Cubs has supernatural origins here. "Priced to Sell," by Naomi Novik, is also very entertaining. It's about vampires buying real estate in Manhattan. But you will have fun with all 20 stories.” ―Booklist
About the Author
Multiple award-winning editor Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for almost thirty years. She was fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and SCIFICTION and has edited more than fifty anthologies, including the horror half of the long-running The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. She lives in New York. Visit her on the web at www.datlow.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
An Excerpt from
CURSES
a Dresden Files short story
by Jim Butcher
Most of my cases are pretty tame. Someone loses a piece of jewelry with a lot of sentimental value, or someone comes to me because they’ve just moved into a new house and it’s a little more haunted than the seller’s disclosure indicated. Nothing Chicago’s only professional wizard can’t handle--but they don’t usually rake in much money, either.
So when a man in a two-thousand dollar suit opened my office door and came inside, he had my complete attention.
I mean, I didn’t take my feet down off my desk or anything. But I paid attention.
He looked my office up and down, and frowned, as though he didn’t much approve of what he saw. Then he looked at me and said, “Excuse me, is this the office of--”
“Dolce,” I said.
He blinked. “Excuse me.”
“Your suit,” I said. “Dolce and Gabbana. Silk. Very nice. You might want to consider an overcoat, though, now that it’s cooling off. Paper says we’re in for some rain.”
He studied me intently for a moment. He was a man in his late prime. His hair was dyed too dark and the suit looked like it probably hid a few pounds. “You must be Harry Dresden.”
I inclined my head toward him. “Agent or attorney?”
“A little of both,” he said, looking around my office again. “I represent a professional entertainment corporation which wishes to remain anonymous for the time being. My name is Donovan. My sources tell me that you’re the man who might be able to help us.”
My office isn’t anything to write home about. It’s on a corner, with windows on two walls, but it’s furnished for function, not style--scuffed-up wooden desks, a couple of comfortable chairs, some old metal filing cabinets, a used wooden table, and a coffee pot that was old enough to have belonged to Neanderthals. I figured Donovan was worried that he’d exposed his suit to unsavory elements, and resisted an irrational impulse to spill my half-cup of cooling coffee on it.
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“What you need, and whether you can afford me.”
Donovan fixed me with a stern look. I bore up under it as best I could. “Do you intend to gouge me for a fee, Mister Dresden?”
“For every penny I reasonably can,” I told him.
He blinked at me. “You… you’re quite up front about it, aren’t you?”
“Saves time,” I said.
“What makes you think I would tolerate such a thing?”
“People don’t come to me until they’re pretty desperate, Mr. Donovan,” I said, “especially rich people and hardly ever corporations. Besides, you come in here all intriguey and coy, not wanting to reveal who your employer is. That means that in addition to whatever else you want from me, you want my discretion, too.”
“So your increased fee is a polite form of blackmail?”
“Cost of doing business. If you want this done on the downlow, you make my job more difficult. You should expect to pay a little more than a conventional customer when you’re asking for more than they are.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “How much are you going to cost me?”
I shrugged a shoulder. “Let’s find out. What do you want me to do?”
He stood up and turned to walk to the door. He stopped before he reached it, read the words HARRY DRESDEN, WIZARD backwards in the frosted glass, and eyed me over his shoulder. “I assume that you have heard of any number of curses in local folklore.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I suppose you’ll expect me to believe in their existence.”
I shrugged. “They’ll exist or not exist regardless of what you believe, Mr. Donovan.” I paused. “Well. Except for the ones that don’t exist except in someone’s mind. They’re only real because somebody believes. But that edges from the paranormal over toward psychology. I’m not licensed for that.”
He grimaced and nodded. “In that case--“
I felt a little slow off the mark as I realized what we were talking about. “A cursed local entertainment corporation,” I said. “Like maybe a sports team.”
He kept a poker face on, and it was a pretty good one.
“You’re talking about the Billy Goat Curse,” I said.
Donovan arched an eyebrow and then gave me an almost imperceptible nod as he turned around to face me again. “What do you know about it?”
I blew out my breath and ran my fingers back through my hair. “Uh, back in 1945 or so, a tavern owner named Sianis was asked to leave a World Series game at Wrigley. Seems his pet goat was getting rained on and it smelled bad. Some of the fans were complaining. Outraged at their lack of social élan, Sianis pronounced a curse on the stadium, stating that never again would a World Series game be played there--well, actually he said something like, ‘Them Cubs, they ain’t gonna win no more,’ but the World Series thing is the general interpretation.”
“And?” Donovan asked.
“And I think if I’d gotten kicked out of a series game I’d been looking forward to, I might do the same thing.”
“You have a goat?”
“I have a moose,” I said.
He blinked at that for a second, didn’t understand it, and decided to ignore it. “If you know that, then you know that many people believe that the curse has held.”
“Where the Series is concerned, the Cubbies have been filled with fail and dipped in suck sauce since 1945,” I acknowledged. “No matter how hard they try, just when things are looking up, something seems to go bad at the worst possible time.” I paused to consider. “I can relate.”
“You’re a fan, then?”
“More of a kindred spirit.”
He looked around my office again and gave me a small smile. “But you follow the team.”
“I go to games when I can.”
“That being the case,” Donovan said, “you know that the team has been playing well this year.”
“And the Cubs want to hire yours truly to prevent the curse from screwing things up.”
Donovan shook his head. “I never said that the Cubs organization was involved.”
“Hell of a story, though, if they were.”
Donovan frowned severely.
“The Tribune would run it on the front page. Cubs Hire Professional Wizard to Break Curse, maybe. Rick Morrissey would have a ball with that story.”
“My clients,” Donovan said firmly, “...
Most helpful customer reviews
33 of 37 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent collection of modern Fairy Tales
By thebookwormgirl
With 20 authors contributing to this anthology, I have decided not to break it down by each story. My review would then be endless and y'all would just get bored reading it. Instead, I'll tell you that this is an outstanding collection of short stories that showcases some of the many faces of urban fantasy. From Horror to Faeries, a Wizard Detective, and the Troll of Seattle, you will find something you like in this collection.
My favorites are the following (in order of appearance):
1. Curses by Jim Butcher
2. On the Slide by Richard Bowes
3. Fairy Gifts by Patricia Briggs
4. Picking up the Pieces by Pat Cadigan
5. Underbridge by Peter S. Beagle
6. The Bricks of Gelecek by Matthew Kressel
7. The Way Station by Nathan Ballingrud
8. Guns for the Dead by Melissa Marr
9. King Pole, Gallows Pole, Bottle Tree by Elizabeth Bear
The other eleven stories are good, but to me, these just stood out as great examples of what a short story should be (a glimpse in a character's life, one theme explored; in short the modern fairy tale). With so many to choose from, I am sure there will be those who disagree with me on which stories are their favorites. But that is the beauty of this collection, it's all good and there is something for everyone
21 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
Naked City
By Brendan Moody
"Urban fantasy" is one of those subgenre labels that I've never been quite sure of the meaning of. I associate it primarily with Charles de Lint, an obviously gifted writer whose work I've never yet been able to enjoy, and with a certain type of contemporary magical realism. But in the case of Naked City, Ellen Datlow's new anthology, the meaning of urban fantasy is quite literal. Each of those twenty tales takes place in a city. The city might be a real one, or fictional; it might be within the United States (New York City features five times) or elsewhere in the world, or in another reality entirely; the setting might be past or present. But always, there is the city, bewitching and terrifying, frustrating and wonderful.
For many readers, the major attraction of this anthology will be Jim Butcher's "Curses," a Dresden Files story set in that series' milieu, Chicago. I'll confess that I've never read any of the series (supernatural detectives aren't my thing), and while "Curses" wasn't dazzling enough to change my mind on that, it's obvious that Butcher has mastered the wry private detective voice and done a credible job placing that voice in a world of fairies, demons, and yes, curses. This particular story is about baseball, another pastime that has entirely passed me by, but I imagine fans of the sport will get a kick out of Harry Dresden's investigation into the true story behind the Cubs' bad luck, and even I enjoyed it.
Fans of Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint and other novels set in that fantasy world will certainly want to pick up the anthology for "The Duke of Riverside," a story set both before and after the events of that novel, and featuring St. Vier and Alec. The same mixture of swordplay, sharp humor, and passion familiar from other Riverside fiction distinguishes this story, which also highlights the relationship between the aristocratic corner of the city and its less-wealthy regions.
Another star of contemporary fantasy, Peter S. Beagle, offers a grimly ironic story of the woes of academia in "Underbridge," where a visiting professor of children's literature finds himself drawn to Seattle's Fremont Troll statue... and imagines he sees it move. His discovery of the troll's secret life and his precarious position at the university lead to a harrowing decline and a darkly satisfying climax.
In "The Projected Girl," Lavie Tidhar offers an eerie mystery from a magician's scrapbook, but the real joy of the story is the evocation of a young boy's experience of growing up in Haifa, from bookshop visits to encounters with fascinating or disturbing relatives to the sheer pleasure of exploring the city itself. Multi-faceted yet elusive, exotic yet radiantly human, this is a story not to be missed.
Born out of one of those bizarre comparisons people dream up when trying to communicate the size of something, John Crowley's "And Go Like This" at first seems like it will beat a metaphor to death, but Crowley weaves words so well that what might have been a ridiculous premise becomes a powerful dream of community and the recognition of common humanity. If only it could be true.
For sheer creepiness, nothing in the anthology can match Jeffrey Ford's "Daddy Longlegs of the Evening." Its opening sentence is "It was said that when he was a small child, asleep in his bed one end-of-summer night, a spider crawled into his ear, traversed a maze of canals, eating slowly through membrane and organ, to discover the cavern of the skull." The imagery remains that disturbing, but its scope expands, ending with a vision of widening horror reminiscent of Thomas Ligotti.
And in "The Colliers' Venus (1893)," Caitlin R. Kiernan brings the reader to Cherry Creek, an alternate version of Denver, Colorado in a steampunk-influenced world. Like much of Kiernan's fiction, this stories draws on the author's knowledge of paleontology and the long history of inexplicable Fortean events, as Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy investigates a strange discovery made in the mine tunnels beneath the city. Kiernan's gift for describing weird vistas of cosmic terror in poetic language results in a fine tale redolent of humanity's ignorance and impermanence.
These were my own favorite stories from the anthology, but there are others every bit as striking, from "Oblivion by Calvin Klein," a sharp-edged absurdist satire on conspicuous consumption, to "Picking Up the Pieces," about an unusual encounter during the fall of the Berlin Wall, to "Priced to Sell," an inventive comic fantasy about the New York real estate scene. I hope it's obvious from these bare descriptions that readers should check any preconceptions about "urban fantasy" at the door. This is an anthology that captures the full scope of the genre, from humorous to dark, from epic to magical realism. With a contributor list full of best sellers, award winners, and legends of the genre, Naked City is a thick, rich anthology, not to be missed.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A mixed bag
By Kathy Davie
An anthology of 20 urban fantasies in a variety of cities.
Series:
"Curses" (Dresden Files, 10.9)
"Duke of Riverside" (Riverside, before and after Swordspoint (Riverside, #1))
"Guns for the Dead" (Graveminder??, prequel?)
The Stories
Jim Butcher's "Curses" is a funny tale of baseball, the Cubs, and Wrigley Field when Harry is hired to lift the curse preventing the Cubs from winning the World Series. Any World Series.
Delia Sherman's "How the Pooka Came to New York City" is cute and unexpectedly benign with a pooka involved! It's 1855 and we follow the emigration of Liam O'Casey accompanied by a pooka who believes he owes a debt.
Richard Bowes' "On the Slide" is a well-done, but sad tale of a bad economy and how a guy, himself down on his luck, is coping. Only there's more to sliding than simply slipping down the economic scale. It can also have a time element. One which could save your butt.
A good story, but rather confusing to read. I'd be curious to know if this is a series.
Ellen Kushner's "Duke of Riverside" leans heavily to the fantasy side of urban fantasy with a lord wanting to escape his destiny.
This was clever and cute, and I'm'a gonna put the Riverside series on my TBR, starting with Swordspoint (Riverside, #1).
Christopher Fowler's "Oblivion by Calvin Klein" is an odd tale about a woman addicted to spending money. I did not understand the ending at all.
Patricia Briggs' "Fairy Gifts" combines an historical introspection in 1900 and present-day Butte, Montana about the mines with opium, vampires, and the fey thrown in to make it interesting.
Pat Cadigan's "Picking Up the Pieces" will resonate with those of you with a dysfunctional family member whom you always have to rescue as well as those who fall in love with users. Cadigan combines this with the fey and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Peter S. Beagle's "Underbridge" is a grim tale of a professor desperate for permanence and tenure and the lengths to which he may go if provoked. Eeek!
I do wonder if he's having a poke at Kat Richardson and her Greywalker series...hmmm...
Naomi Novik's "Priced to Sell" short story is a series of tiny tales reflecting the travails of a real estate broker in New York City when dealing with supernatural issues.
This is just too funny with its combination of human concerns and fey problems.
Matthew Kressel's "Bricks of Gelecek" is just too creepy with its foursome of destruction and eradication. And it's tiny kernel of hope.
Kit Reed's "Weston Walks" is a sad tale of conflicting desires: retain the material goods you value or chase the one you love.
Lavie Tidhar's "Projected Girl" takes place in Haifa as an episode in young Danny's life
I loved the references to favorite Hebrew authors and series as well as the incorporation of Jewish culture---especially Tidhar's creating a character who loves books! Tidhar really caught the flavor of a child's view of the world. I wish, however, that Tidhar hadn't just left us hanging at the sad end.
Nathan Ballingrud's "Way Station" is another sad tale of a homeless man's life as he considers tracking down his daughter and her family.
Melissa Marr's "Guns for the Dead" slowly seeps its reality into your head as Francis Lee Lemons undergoes an unusual job interview. After he's dead.
Sounds like this might be a prequel to a new series. Marr has created an entire world with backstory and intrigue in this short. If it is a series, it's going on my TBR!
John Crowley's "And Go Like This" is confusing and appears to be a dystopian short with the world twisting in on itself.
I think.
Holly Black's "Noble Rot" starts out so sweetly, and then she hits you with the truth behind it.
Don't eat before reading this one! Yup, it just takes that one twist...
Jeffrey Ford's "Daddy Long Legs of the Evening" is just so gross. Yuck. Ick.
Lucius Shepard's "Skinny Girl" is just weird. Maybe you need to know something about Santa Muerte to understand what Shepard is doing, but there was a very surreal quality to this one.
Caitlí R. Kiernan's "Colliers' Venus" takes a really long time to get started. When it finally did get to the point, I got lost in why she bothered with one end or the other.
Elizabeth Bear's "King Pole, Gallows Pole, Bottle Tree" does indeed fulfill the title of the story. I have to wonder if Bear just couldn't decide which one she wanted as a title, though. This one was another weird one. You are left to wonder throughout the entire story just who the main protagonists are without ever learning. The story itself is interesting, and scary as I/me/Jackie loses his memory.
The Cover
The cover is sleazy in its bright blue and browns with a punkish Harry in a shrunken hat checking out a corset-clad Santa Muerte.
Ellen Datlow discusses her reason for the title in a reference to an old television series, The Naked City, which provides the theme for this anthology of urban fantasies in a variety of cities.
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