Nineteen writers dig into the imaginative spaces between conventional genres—realistic and fantastical, scholarly and poetic, personal and political—and bring up gems of new fiction: interstitial fiction.

This is the literary mode of the new century, a reflection of the complex, ambiguous, and challenging world that we live in. These nineteen stories, by some of the most interesting and innovative writers working today, will change your mind about what stories can and should do as they explore the imaginative space between conventional genres. The editors garnered stories from new and established authors in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, and also fiction translated from Spanish, Hungarian, and French. The collection features stories from Christopher Barzak, Colin Greenland, Holly Phillips, Rachel Pollack, Vandana Singh, Anna Tambour, Catherynne Valente, Leslie What, and others.

“A wildly varied cacophony of a book, by turns beautiful, funny, frightening, frustrating, and baffling, but never boring.”—New Haven Review

“Odd, Deep, Delightful”—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“This idea of playing with genre conventions is interstitiality's charm and what makes it a movement for the hypertext age. We want words to do more now and for our time not to have been spent with just one idea.”—Adrienne Martini, Baltimore City Paper

Delia Sherman was born in Tokyo and brought up in New York City. She earned a PhD in Renaissance studies at Brown University and taught at Boston and North-eastern universities. She is the author of the novels Through a Brazen Mirror, The Porcelain Dove (a Mythopoeic Award winner), and Changeling. Sherman co-founded the Interstitial Arts Foundation, dedicated to promoting art that crosses genre borders.

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent a peripatetic childhood in various European countries. She teaches at Boston University, is completing a PhD, and is introducing classes on the fantastic tradition in English literature. She is the author of a short story collection, In the Forest of Forgetting.