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.