From the inside flap: It was on a ferry ride to Manhattan that the idea for this anthology was conceived, Robin McKinley tells us in her foreword. The stories all would be fantasy, but with a particularly strong sense of location of the lands in which they take place.

The result is an enthralling collection of nine stories, the settings of which range from what might be mistaken for a California landscape in James P. Blaylock's "Paper Dragons", to the hidden town beneath a real Norwich, England in Robert Westall's "The Big Rock Candy Mountain", to Robin McKinley's "The Stone Fey" which takes place in imaginary Damar, the scene of her prizewinning novels. And expert fantasists Peter Dickinson, P. C. Hodgell, Michael de Larrabeiti, Patricia A. McKillip, Joan D. Vinge, and Jane Yolen contribute their own visionary landscapes.

The armchair traveller will find dragons and fairies, magic and myth, the best of fantasy on this grand tour of Imaginary Lands.

Paper dragons / James P. Blaylock
The old woman and the storm / Patricia A. McKillip
The big rock candy mountain / Robert Westall
Flight / Peter Dickinson
Evian steel / Jan Yolen
Stranger blood / P.C. Hodgell
The curse of Igamor / Michael de Larrabeiti
Tam Lin / Joan D. Vinge
The stone fey / Robin McKinley.