Joe Abercrombie has earned a reputation as a writer of gritty, intense fantasy that’s unafraid to deconstruct and reexamine the typical fantasy assumptions. For many readers, this falls firmly in the camp of being “a very good thing,” though individual mileage may vary (see here for an interesting blog post and an impressive thread of commentary responding to one critic’s unfavorable opinions on postmodern interpretations of the fantasy genre). His freshman effort, The First Law, offered up a fresh, violent, and often funny take on epic fantasy...

As I mentioned in my review of Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay is well known for his “historical fiction,” using the geography and societies from factual history as the inspiration for his meticulously written, fantasy-based accounts. An analogue of a moment often overlooked in Europe’s history, The Lions of al-Rassan replicates the final decades of the Reconquista, a thousand years ago. For several centuries after the Muslim capture of the Iberian Peninsula (now the modern states of Spain and Portugal), three radically different cultures and religions coexisted in precarious balance, until the inevitable tensions between Islam...

Brandon Sanderson’s first novel, Elantris, was published only five years ago, in 2005. Since then, this prolific writer’s impressive catalog of published novels has established him as a fantasy author to be reckoned with. His Mistborn trilogy is especially loved among fantasy readers for its knuckle-whitening action, meticulous world-building, and intricate system of magic. When fantasy author Robert Jordan died before completing his magnum opus, the 10,000 page The Wheel of Time, Jordan’s widow selected Brandon Sanderson to finish the series’s final three volumes, the first of which, 2009′s The Gathering...

It seems every year a debut fantasy novels electrifies the speculative fiction community. Scott Lynch opened a planned seven volume series (The Gentleman Bastard Sequence) with The Lies of Locke Lamora, which arrived in a perfect storm of buzz, excitement, and positive reviews. So did Scott Lynch’s debut live up to the hype, and with the benefit of hindsight, does it compare favorably to other impressive fantasy debuts? I would say yes and no; unlike many reviewers, my reaction to The Lies of Locke Lamora was decidedly mixed. ..

Jeff Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen is a sometimes bewildering collection of works related to the fictional city of Ambergris. Almost immediately, it becomes apparent that this is not your typical fantasy; instead, Vandermeer's literature is a bizarre amalgamation of fantasy, horror, and postmodern literary techniques.

Guy Gavriel Kay, a Canadian author with a dozen published manuscripts under his belt, has established himself as an author of "historical fiction," or at least that's the description often given to his novels. Tigana, set in a fictionalized version of medieval Italy, continues this tradition...