I was ordering a subscription to the Clarkesworld Magazine chapbooks (which look gorgeous) and the order form asks “Who is your favorite author?” This stopped me dead in my tracks. Favorite. I was just having this conversation with my husband last night about The Sparrow. It is the book that I always recommend when people ask me to recommend a book. But it’s not my favorite book. My favorite book is probably Lavender and Old Lace by Myrtle Reed.

This is favorite defined as “a person or thing regarded with special favor or preference” because it’s certainly not the best book I’ve ever read, but it makes me cry everytime and I love it. She wrote in 1902 and it’s a straight ahead romance, with mild fantasy elements, and yes there is purple prose. But the characters are very real and the descriptions are evocative. I mean look at this line, “The faded green shutters blended harmoniously with the greyish white background, and the piazza, which was evidently an unhappy afterthought of the architect, had two or three new shingles on is roof.”

So, favorite author? Orson Scott Card, Mary Doria Russell, Guy Gavriel Kay, Steven Brust, Neil Gaiman, C.S. Lewis…? Lordy. I should just put down Myrtle Reed and confuse the living daylights out of them. I regard all of them with special favor.

I think I’ll go with Steven Brust though, because of three things: I won a interpretive reading competition in college with an excerpt from Brokedown Palace; I had my first fan girl squee! over him; I read The Sun, The Moon, and the Stars whenever I’m creatively constipated and that always gets me over it. I have a special regard for him for that.

So who’s your favorite author?

Check out the Strange Horizons Review of Twenty Epics, edited by David Moles and Susan Marie Groppi.

“Most successful is “Bound Man,” Mary Robinette Kowal’s stark re-humanization of the hero archetype. When the soldier-priest Halldór, hard-pressed by foes, chants the spell to summon the legendary warrior Li Reiko, he has no idea that he is in fact bringing her out of the past, separating her from her children and the life she knows and setting in motion the chain of events that leads to the development of his own culture. As she struggles to adapt to her new reality, Reiko’s grief and anger stand in sharp contrast to the usual devil-may-care attitude of mythical heroes.”

–reviewed by Rose Fox, Strange Horizons

Okay, I lied. I closed the donation window, but these two came in right after I went to bed. They are lovely and I covet both of them.

• A six-issue Interzone subscription.
• An illustration by Sandro Castelli for the story of your choice.