Sally Partridge is an author of award-winning young-adult fiction novels and short stories. She was named one of Mail & Guardian’s 200 Young South Africans in 2011 and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story prize in 2013. Her fifth novel, Mine, was published in 2018. Find her on Twitter @sapartridge
Maha Khan Phillips is a multiple award winning financial journalist and editor, and the author of The Curse of Mohenjodaro, Beautiful from this Angle, and The Mystery of the Aagnee Ruby. She has a bachelor’s degree in Politics and International Relations and masters’ degrees in International Conflict Analysis and in Creative Writing. She grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, and currently lives in London.
Daniel Polansky lives in Los Angeles. He finds enumerating accomplishments gauche, but if you were really interested you could check out DanielPolansky.com
Amira Salah-Ahmed is a Cairo-based writer and journalist. She has covered Egypt’s news for local and international publications for more than a decade and is one of the co-founders of independent media company, Mada Masr. With a certain fluidity between journalism and creative writing, she began writing poetry in 2010. She has also co-authored a book (Tahrir Memoirs) with a group of writers and bloggers about the 18-day uprising, published in Arabic and Italian in 2012.
Sami Shah is a multi-award winning writer, comedian, broadcaster. His first novel Fire Boy was released in 2016, and is now available in South Asia as The Boy of Fire and Earth. Sami has written columns for national and international newspapers and magazines, short stories for anthologies, and documentaries for radio. He’s currently based in Melbourne.
Matt Suddain is a New Zealand-born writer and the author of two novels: Theatre of the Gods (2013) and Hunters & Collectors (2016). He lives in London.
Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning and Premio Roma nominee A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), the World Fantasy Award winning Osama (2011) and of the Campbell Award winning and Locus and Clarke Award nominated Central Station (2016). His latest novels are the forthcoming Unholy Land (2018) and his first children’s novel, Candy (2018). He is the author of many other novels, novellas and short stories.
Genevieve Valentine has written novels, comics, and short fiction. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and NPR.org.
Marina Warner writes fiction and cultural history. Her novels include The Lost Father (1988), INdigo (1992) and The Leto Bundle (2000), and she has published three collections of short stories, most recently Fly Away Home (2014). Her critical studies focus on myth and fairytale, in such books as Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (1982), From the Beast to the Blonde (1994), and Stranger Magic: Charmed States and The Arabian Nights (2011; winner of the National Book Critics Circle award, the Sheykh Zayed Prize and the Truman Capote award). She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, Professorial Research Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, a Fellow of the British Academy, and was elected President of the Royal Society of Literature in 2017. In 2015, she was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities, and in 2017 she was given a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. Fairy Tale: A Very Short Introduction came out in January 2018 and Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists in Autumn 2018. She is currently working on the project www.storiesintransit.com, researching the concept of Sanctuary and writing an ‘unreliable memoir’ A Life Mislaid about her childhood in Egypt.
Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin are the editors of—collectively—over two dozen anthologies, including The Djinn Falls in Love. They live 6,549 miles apart.
Praise for The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories
“These then are not Disneyfied tales of wish-granting tricksters, but stories of people burning like djinn, and djinn as fiery people. Nearly all of the stories are haunting, reflective and firelight-beautiful...Exquisite and audacious, and highly recommended.”
N. K. Jemisin, The New York Times
“The authors weave the magical beings into their own cultures, some taking heavy hints from The Arabian Nights, others using djinn as an abstract, heavy longing to belong or as a haunting presence on Mars. The djinn is used to explore topics such as women’s sexuality and the disconnect between modern warfare and human lives... Together, these fantasy stories offer a rich and illuminating cultural experience.”
Everdeen Mason, The Washington Post
“Their love for this work shines through in the care with which they’ve selected and arranged the stories... It is—here’s that word again—gorgeous. This thematic coherence adds an extra element to the anthology as a whole: the individual stories, and their relation to each other, have something to say.”
Liz Bourke, Tor.com
“Readers looking for stories set in a variety of locales even outer space) and arrayed over various cultures and religions will find much to like.”
Publishers Weekly
“This collection will help readers see beyond the characters and plots to the cultures and people behind them. It will allow readers to think about things that may be uncomfortable or sensitive due to political rhetoric. And lastly it will let readers enter a world that they have no idea about. Even for those audiences who are already aware of jinn stories, this collection offers a previously unheard of range to capture the imagination.”
The New York Journal of Books
“The entirety of The Djinn Falls in Love is an expression of its title: it is not about djinn so much as it is about love, about the longing inherent in falling-for, in reaching out to connect with another person, to grant a wish or have a wish granted, and to face the consequences of either. In selecting thematically cohesive stories on these subjects, Murad and Shurin have done the field a service: the djinn are present and with us in speculative fiction, and we merely need to express longing.”
Strange Horizons
“This is a showcase of authorial skill—delicious prose and well-crafted narratives bending themselves around their chosen theme. Particular favourites for me include a number of authors new to me—one of my many reasons for loving anthologies. I shall certainly be watching out for these names in future.”
Speculative Herald
Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories was one of the first true children's books in the English language, a timeless classic that continues to delight readers to this day. Beautiful, evocative and playful, the stories of How the Whale Got His Throat or How the First Letter Was Written paint a world of magic and wonder.
It's also deeply rooted in British colonialism. Kipling saw the Empire as a benign, civilising force, in a way that's troubling to modern readers. Not So Stories attempts to redress the balance, bringing together new and established writers of colour from around the world to take the Just So Stories back, to interrogate, challenge and celebrate their legacy.
Including stories by Adiwijaya Iskandar, Joseph E. Cole, Raymond Gates, Stewart Hotston, Zina Hutton, Georgina Kamsika, Cassandra Khaw, Paul Krueger, Tauriq Moosa, Jeannette Ng, Ali Nouraei, Wayne Santos and Zedeck Siew, illustrations by Woodrow Phoenix and an introduction by Nikesh Shukla.
www.abaddonbooks.com
A fascinating collection of new and classic tales of the fearsome Djinn, from bestselling, award-winning and breakthrough international writers.
Imagine a world filled with fierce, fiery beings, hiding in our shadows, in our dreams, under our skins. Eavesdropping and exploring; savaging our bodies, saving our souls. They are monsters, saviours, victims, childhood friends. Some have called them genies: these are the Djinn.
And they are everywhere. On street corners, behind the wheel of a taxi, in the chorus, between the pages of books. Every language has a word for them. Every culture knows their traditions. Every religion, every history has them hiding in their dark places.
There is no part of the world that does not know them. They are the Djinn. They are among us.
With stories from Neil Gaiman, Nnedi Okorafor, Amal El-Mohtar, Catherine Faris K
ing, Claire North, E.J. Swift, Hermes (trans. Robin Moger), Jamal Mahjoub, James Smythe, J.Y. Yang, Kamila Shamsie, Kirsty Logan, K.J. Parker, Kuzhali Manickavel, Maria Dahvana Headley, Monica Byrne, Saad Hossain, Sami Shah, Sophia Al-Maria and Usman Malik.
www.solarisbooks.com
ON THE ROAD TO NOWHERE
Each step leads you closer to your destination, but who, or what, can you expect to meet along the way?
Here are stories of misfits, spectral hitch-hikers, nightmare travel tales and the rogues, freaks and monsters to be found on the road. The critically acclaimed editor of Magic, The End of The Line and House of Fear has brought together the contemporary masters and mistresses of the weird from around the globe in an anthology of travel tales like no other. Strap on your seatbelt, or shoulder your backpack, and wait for that next ride... into darkness.
An incredible anthology of original short stories from an exciting list of writers including the best-selling Philip Reeve, the World Fantasy Award-winning Lavie Tidhar and the incredible talents of S.L. Grey, Ian Whates, Jay Caselberg, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Zen Cho, Sophia McDougall, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Anil Menon, Rio Youers, Vandana Singh, Paul Meloy, Adam Nevill and Helen Marshall.
www.solarisbooks.com
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