I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with the city of my birth, which is why I was so pleased to be a part of editor Luis Ortiz’s anthology project, Why New Yorkers Smoke, published on September 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
As Ortiz explains:
People not there when it all went down seem to have forgotten that it was like a great furnace igniting in hell. It was not much later when I came to realize that I would like to do a book of stories about fear and New Yorkers. As editor I found that unless I wanted a collection of tabloid stories the only way to approach this theme was by embracing fantastika, that is fantasy, horror and science fiction. I was lucky in being able to get some of the top writers working in these genres, many of them New Yorkers themselves, to answer the question: “What is there to fear in New York City?”
If you’d like to see my answer to that question—as well as the answers of Carol EMshwiller, Barry Malzberg, Paul Di Filippo, and others—you can purchase a copy of the book here.