The Publishers Weekly review of Mary Robinette Kowal’s first book, Scenting the Dark and Other Stories, begins and ends just about perfectly: “Campbell Award-winner Kowal presents a broad spectrum of stories in her chapbook-slim first collection… This excellent introduction to her work is likely to make her new fans.”

On the eve of shipping Greg Egan’s new collection, Crystal Nights and Other Stories, we have another pair of great reviews to share. First, from SF Site: “Here in Crystal Nights and Other Stories, he finds a way to balance the complexity of his ideas with enough story and character for the reader to care about them as stories and not just speculative essays on the latest in cosmology, physics or artificial intelligence research, and shows how good a writer Greg Egan can be.” And, from a lengthy review in Locus that considers each tale in the collection: “Throughout, the tonic key of this collection is passionate engagement with a world in which understanding processes cannot be separated from moral vision, in which understanding is itself a kind of sacrament, a validation of our nature as thinking beings.”