Eccentric Symmetries, 20 fantasy short stories spanning the forty-year career of author Nancy Springer, showcases tales ranging from the quirky to the transcendent. Including mythic tales of long ago and far away such as award-winner "The Boy Who Plaited Manes," this collection also contains wry, sometimes humorous contemporary fantasy stories such as "Rumple What?" and "Snow Spawn," plus mystic magical realism in which cabbage roses grow down from the ceiling ("Mariposa") and hard-edged future fantasy stories such as "We Don't Know Why," a tale of failing "angels." Like our lives, the stories in Eccentric Symmetries are mostly off-kilter, even laughable, but sometimes achieve a luminous moment of perfect balance, an epiphany. In this carefully selected collection, every fantasy reader should find something to love.