title: Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy
author:  Ellen Datlow 
description: In this all-original anthology, the editors, longtime partners in <i>The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror</i>, bring together mostly new fantasy writers, most of them contributors to previous Datlow/Windling books and perhaps forming a distinct "school." Call it American magic realism. In most stories, a departure from (usually) contemporary reality is taken for granted, with no one asking questions or expressing wonder. In Jeffrey Ford's "The Night Whiskey," a small town holds a lottery to see who gets to drink magic wine made from a bush that only grows in corpses. The drunken winners are then ritually knocked out of the trees into which they climb while communing with ancestral ghosts. Why? It merely is. While Ford can make this approach work, the book's weakness is that many of the stories are poetic at the expense of sense. There is, however, an outstanding opener by Delia Sherman, plus good work by Peter S. Beagle, Lucius Shepard, Catherynne Valente and Paul Di Filippo. <i>(Dec.)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  _The Flirt_
  
  
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  _Kathleen Tessaro_
  
  
  
  
  
  Contents
  
  
  La Vie Bohème 1
  
  
  A Self-Made Woman 8
  
  
  Tea for Table Five 17
  
  
  45 Chester Square 24
  
  
  Free Lunch or a Shag 33
  
  
  Armenian Plumbers 42
  
  
  The King of the Tennis Ball 45
  
  
  A Stranger at the Garrick Club 49
  
  
  111 Half Moon Street 55
  
  
  A Subtle Twist of Fate 58
  
  
  The Interview 69
  
  
  The Rules 77
  
  
  Professional Massagers of the Female Ego 82
  
  
  La Dame aux Camélias 88
  
  
  [High Tea at Claridge’s 95 ](index_split_001.html#p103)
  
  
  [A Brief History of the Professional Flirt 111 ](index_split_001.html#p119)
  
  
  [The World’s Most Exclusive Hairdresser 114 ](index_split_001.html#p122)
  
  
  [Another Moriarty Original 121 ](index_split_001.html#p129)
  
  
  [A Man’s World 131 ](index_split_001.html#p139)
  
  
  [Nick the Nose 136 ](index_split_001.html#p144)
  
  
  [Make Me a Willow Cabin at Your Gate 142 ](index_split_001.html#p150)
  
  
  [The Cardinal Rule 153 ](index_split_001.html#p161)
  
  
  [A Clean Break 160 ]