Dancing Through the Fire

Life, death, love, and truth: major themes that frequently appear in Grandmaster Tanith Lee’s fiction, are all represented in Dancing Through the Fire, one of the last collections she put together before her untimely death. The stories in this book have never before been collected, and four of them have never before been published. These tales will transport you from mystical lands to mystical worlds, corporeal manifestations of myth, and mythical interpretations of life, into realms you’ve never visited (and in some cases, could never have imagined visiting).

In her obituary, the Guardian called Tanith Lee “one of the most influential revisionist and feminist voices in contemporary fantasy writing,” and said her work has a “sensibility in which the relentless pursuit of personal autonomy and sensual fulfilment leads her characters to the brink of delirium, as well as to a fierce integrity that can co-habit with self-sacrificing empathy.” The Village Voice called her “the Princess Royal of Fantasy,” and enotes says she is “an accomplished technician and stylist. Her sophisticated presentations carry the reader along breathlessly, yet her style invites reading aloud.”

Table of Contents:
Prologue: Dancing Through the Fire
Move One: Life and Death
Death Dances
The Death of Death
That Glisters Is
My Lovely (previously unpublished short story)
Move Two: The Power of Will
The Flame
Fold
Last Dancer (previously unpublished short story)
Move Three: Chancing It
In the City of Dead Night
Sold
The World Well Lost
Move Four: Love Stories?
Lora (previously unpublished short story)
Medra
Unnalash
Comfort and Despair
Move Five: Inner Truth
Burn Her (previously unpublished novelette)
The Sequence of Swords and Hearts
Epilogue: Riddle

Recognition:

“Burn Her” (which was first published in Dancing Through the Fire) was a finalist for the 2016 WSFA Small Press Award.

Dancing Through the Fire was a finalist for the 2016 Locus Award for Best Collection.

Reviews of the Book:

Lee’s decadent, Gothic-inflected pieces range from delicate fantasias about the whims of a personified death to straightforward, suspenseful sword-and-sorcery featuring resourceful but outmatched thieves.… The collection’s most emotional and most recent pieces are meditations on the power of art.… But it’s difficult to read the stunning new piece “Burn Her,” in which a dead painter’s right arm refuses to either stop painting or succumb to fire, as anything other than Lee’s graceful acknowledgement and defiance of her own mortality, a very high point in this uneven swan song. —Publishers Weekly

Dancing Through the Fire, subtitled “A Collection of Stories in Five Moves”, is no random gathering. Tanith Lee selected, introduced, and arranged these works before she died in May, also writing the prologue that gives the book its title, plus three new pieces suited to its symphony of shifting moods. The novelette “Burn Her” seems particularly bold.… The tales themselves can be eloquent, inspiring, wry—skewed takes on famous Lovers(?)—often, marvelously, all of the above.… “Burn Her” dances through the flame to glimpse a beauty that can only be suggested—not revealed or understood, while we still live. —Locus (October 2015)

Named to Locus Magazine’s 2015 Recommended Reading List.