Jessica Amanda Salmonson seems to have a thing for "literary" heroic fantasy, and indeed in her introduction to this volume she points out that many of our best-known classics (including "The Iliad," "The Divine Comedy," "Don Quixote," "Hamlet," "Gulliver's Travels," and others) could be filed under that heading. I tend not to agree (they may be fantasy, but mostly they're not very heroic), but I did enjoy most of the stories in the collection. Keith Roberts's "The Inn at the World's End" and the editor's "The Lingering Minstrel" have much of the flavor of Jack Vance, a favorite author of mine; Avram Davidson and Manly Wade Wellman (other favorites) check in with new pieces (Wellman's, featuring his Kardios the Atlantean, is about the only piece in the collection that could truly be described as "heroic"); Michael Bishop's "Voices" takes place in ancient China, and Grania Davis's "The Word-Woman of Dza" in Tibet, neither of which are common locales for fantasy of any stripe; Gillian FitzGerald's 20th-Century story "Eammon's Banshee" tells of the relationship between a young IRA fighter and his family banshee; and the cover story, "The Lion of Elorhim's Anger," by Michael Nicholas Richard (whom I can't recall hearing of anywhere else--even the fantasticfiction site doesn't list him) finds a minstrel trying to unravel the cause of a city's mercenary personality. An interesting and varied collection, even if not always heroic as I define that term.
