SONGS OF LOVE & DEATH.pdf

SONGS OF LOVE & DEATH

any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights

Department, 1230

Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Gallery Books hardcover edition November 2010

GALLERY BOOKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon &

Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com.

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For

more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers

Bureau at 1-866-248-3049

or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Songs of love and death : tales of star-crossed love / edited by George R. R. Martin

and Gardner Dozois. -- 1st Gallery Books hardcover ed.

p. cm.

1. Love stories, American. 2. Love stories, English. 3. Fantasy fiction, American.

4. Fantasy fiction, English. I. Martin, George R. R. II. Dozois, Gardner R.

PS648.L6S55 2010 823'.08508--dc22 2010021181

ISBN 978-1-4391-5014-6

ISBN 978-1-4391-7083-0 (ebook)

For everyone we've loved and lost

--you know who you are.

CONTENTS

Star-crossed Lovers ix

Love Hurts, Jim Butcher

The Marrying Maid, Jo Beverley

Rooftops, Carrie Vaughn

Hurt Me, M. L. N. Hanover

Demon Lover, Cecelia Holland

The Wayfarer's Advice, Melinda M. Snodgrass

Blue Boots, Robin Hobb

The Thing About Cassandra, Neil Gaiman

After the Blood, Marjorie M. Liu

You, and You Alone, Jacqueline Carey

His Wolf, Lisa Tuttle

Courting Trouble, Linnea Sinclair

The Demon Dancer, Mary Jo Putney

Under/Above the Water, Tanith Lee

Kaskia, Peter S. Beagle

Man in the Mirror, Yasmine Galenorn

A Leaf on the Wind of All Hallows, Diana Gabaldon

STAR-CROSSED LOVERS

The earliest reference we can find for the phrase "star-crossed lovers" traces it to

1595, attributing it to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet , a

tragedy about the doomed romance that blossoms between a young man and a

young woman on the brawling streets of Verona, a romance that is

destined to fail because the families they come from are locked in a deadly feud:

"From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, / a pair of star-cross'd

lovers take their life."

It's an astrological phrase, of course, stemming from the old belief (still held today

by millions of people, as a look at any newspaper will tell you)

that the position of the stars at your birth casts a supernatural influence that

determines your fate. So to say that a romantic relationship is "starcrossed"

is to say that the influence of the stars are working against it, that it's opposed by

fate, ill-fated, "thwarted by a malign star." Not meant to

be. That you're destined to be kept apart no matter how hard you struggle to be

together.

In real life, even without the influence of the stars or the dread hand of Fate, there

are any number of things that can doom a relationship--

differences in temperament, race, religion, social status, political affiliations, being

on different sides of a bitter war, philosophical dogma, degrees

of affluence (or lack of it). Even simple distance can work to keep people apart, and

over the centuries there must have been many lovers who

stood on the dock and watched their loved ones sail off to destinations like Australia

or America thousands of miles away, knowing that they'd

never see them again, since in the days before modern transportation, they might as

well have been sailing off to Mars. Many, many immigrants

must have left someone behind them in the Old Country, as they were forced into

exile or set off to find their fortunes, and most were never reunited.

This is a theme that has been eagerly embraced by fiction and folklore, and world

literature is full of star-crossed lovers desperately struggling to

hold on to love no matter how overwhelming the odds against them: Paris and

Helen, Pyramus and Thisbe, Lancelot and Guinevere, Roxanne and

Cyrano, Cathy and Heathcliff. Recently, thanks to the booms in fantasy and romance,

everyone knows of Buffy and Angel, Bill Compton and Sookie

Stackhouse, Edward Cullen and Bella Swan.

Which brings us down to the book you hold in your hands at this moment (unless

you're using your mental powers to make it levitate or reading it

off a screen), a cross-genre anthology called Songs of Love & Death, which explores

the borderlands of fantasy and romance, stories from the

heart and about the heart, tales of endangered love played out against every kind of

setting, from ghost-haunted fantasy landscapes to mile-long

spaceships in transit between the stars, stories where a lover's heart is put in

danger, and love, life, and happiness are at risk with great odds to be

overcome to achieve them. Star-crossed lovers who are really star-crossed, with

grave obstacles to be overcome before they succeed in finding

love (if they do): a wizard who must battle both a supremely powerful vampire and

the hidden desires of his own heart; a man who must seduce a

reluctant maiden or forfeit his family's life to the Queen of Faerie; a woman who falls

in love with a superhero she glimpses hurtling toward the scene

of a crime; a ghost who lusts for sex and blood long after he should be safely in his

grave; a girl who must brave the wrath of an otherworldly prince

to rescue the man she loves; a lonely man who falls in love with a woman he can

never meet; a smuggler who dares to fall in love with the ruler of a

star-spanning Empire; a soldier cast adrift from his world who will face immense

hardships to return to his own time and place; a lover who may--or

may not--exist; a love that persists across lives and worlds, and transcends death . .

We've gathered for you here some of the most prestigious and widely read names in

romance and fantasy, and the booming hot new field of

paranormal romance, including Jim Butcher, Robin Hobb, Neil Gaiman, Diana

Gabaldon, Jacqueline Carey, Carrie Vaughn, and eleven other firstclass

writers. Among other goodies, we are proud to offer you a brand-new Harry Dresden

story, a pivotal story in the Kushiel series, a follow-up to

An Echo in the Bone , and a new novelette set in the Farseer universe. And more

star-crossed lovers, of every imaginable sort, than you can shake

a stick at.

Enjoy!

Jim Butcher

New York Times bestseller Jim Butcher is best known for the Dresden Files series,

starring Harry Dresden, a wizard for hire, who goes down

some very mean streets indeed to do battle against the dark creatures of the

supernatural world and is one of the most popular fictional

characters of the twenty-first century to date; he even had his own TV show. The

Dresden Files books include Storm Front, Fool Moon, Grave

Peril, Summer Knight, Death Masks, Blood Rites, Dead Beat, Proven Guilty, White

Night, Small Favor, and Turn Coat. Butcher is also the author

of the swashbuckling sword and sorcery Codex Alera series, consisting of Furies of

Calderon, Academ's Fury, Cursor's Fury, Captain's Fury, and

Princeps' Fury. His most recent books are First Lord's Fury, the new Codex Alera

novel, and Changes, the new Dresden Files novel. Butcher

lives in Missouri with his wife, his son, and a ferocious guard dog.

Here he sends Harry Dresden up against one of his deadliest adversaries and also

into battle with the secret desires of his heart--which may

turn out to be even more dangerous.

Love Hurts

Murphy gestured at the bodies and said, "Love hurts."

I ducked under the crime scene tape and entered the Wrigleyville apartment. The

smell of blood and death was thick. It made gallows humor

inevitable.

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: