This is Wow

My reading on the train home book at the moment is M.J. Hyland's This is How. What a truly eerie book. The writing is so clean and deceptively simple, perfectly mirroring the main character, and every chapter is creepily ambiguous without the author resorting to any tortuous subterfuge that leaves one feeling cheated. Good stuff.

And how about the guidelines for this upcoming anthology?

This anthology, with the working title Dreaming of Djinn, will look at romantic Orientalism through a speculative fiction lens. You might find lost cities, magical lamps, mummies, thieves, intrepid explorers, slaves, robotic horsemen, noble queens, sorcerers, outcast princes, harems, dancers, djinn, assassins and even smart-talking camels and cats, set in exotic Persia, Egypt, Arabia, the Ottoman Empire, or a modern incarnation of these.

It's One Thousand and One Nights of speculative fiction, so to speak, and I'm a tad excited about it because I have this WIP story that happens to have an oriental setting, an exotic princess, a down-to-earth heroine, a flying horse, a strange machine and...