Sword and Sorceress XIII

A couple of the previous volumes in the S & S franchise were more or less disappointing to me, but this outing seems to be closer to the standard set by the earliest ones. It's longer than most of the first 8-10 numbers (22 stories, where they averaged 16-17), and many of the authors who were standards in the former are now, as editor Bradley points out in her introduction, "now working on their own [novel-]writing or even editing," which means they don't have time to contribute short stories to anthologies. But, of course, it's a truism that if you don't try something new you'll never know what you might be missing, and of the contributors unfamiliar to me, quite a few (Leslie Ann Miller, Heather Rose Jones, John P. Buentello, Marella Sands, Kathleen Dalton Woodbury, P. Andrew Miller, Quinn Weller) provided fictions that I found enjoyable. With 11 total pieces marked as worth rereading, this anthology counts as a success by my criterion (you may, of course, find more, or less, of the contents to your liking: every anthology is something of a crapshoot even if the theme is a favorite). On the whole, I'd call it worthy of your time.