Fascinated by tales of the ancient, long-deposed kings, rulers who wielded a powerful, life-sustaining magic, young history master Basil St. Cloud falls in love with a descendant of the royal line and finds himself caught up in a secret Royalist movement demanding a return to the rituals of the past[...]

Nineteen writers dig into the imaginative spaces between conventional genres-realistic and fantastical, scholarly and poetic, personal and political-and bring up gems of new fiction: interstitial fiction. This is the literary mode of the new century, a reflection of the complex, ambiguous, and chal[...]