You are familiar with the salt of the earth. But did you know there is an even finer, more delicate essence? Take wisdom and imagination, responsibility and beauty, and mix them together in arcane proportions to form a rich and peculiar brine. The resulting water of life is an emotional muddy liquid, filled with existential sediment swirling in the light of secret reality and reflecting prismatic colors of hope and wonder. If allowed to evaporate -- escape, flee, ascend into the ether and join the music of the spheres -- what remains is the quintessence; a precious concentrate that is elusive and volatile, neither fully solid nor so illusory as to be devoid of pithy substance. It is the Salt of the Air. In this debut collection from the critically acclaimed author of Dreams of the Compass Rose and Lords of Rainbow, the nineteen stories are distillations of myth and philosophy, eroticism and ascetic purity. Dipping into an ancient multi-ethnic well, they are the stuff of fantasy—of maidens and deities and senior retirees, of emperors and artists and con artists, of warriors and librarians, of beings without a name and things very fey indeed.... Don't be afraid of ingesting ethereal salt. Open your mind and inhale. "Cautionary, sensual stories of love, reversal and revenge upend fairy tale conventions in Nazarian's lush collection... Sumptuous detail, twisty plots and surprising endings lift these extravagant tales." -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "These are beautiful, haunting confections, reminiscent of Tanith Lee's erotically charged tales... Fine shades of emotion, mythic grandeur, crystalline prose, sharp revisionist intelligence: these are Vera Nazarian's hallmarks..." -- Nick Gevers, LOCUS VERA NAZARIAN is a two-time Nebula Award® Finalist and a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. She immigrated to the USA from the former USSR as a kid, sold her first story at 17, and has been published in numerous anthologies and magazines, honorably mentioned in Year’s Best volumes, and translated into eight languages. Vera made her novelist debut with the critically acclaimed DREAMS OF THE COMPASS ROSE, followed by LORDS OF RAINBOW. Her novella The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass made the 2005 Locus Recommended Reading List. Her debut collection SALT OF THE AIR contains the 2007 Nebula Award-nominated “The Story of Love.” Recent work includes the 2008 Nebula Finalist novella The Duke in His Castle, science fiction collection AFTER THE SUNDIAL (2010), and three Jane Austen parodies, MANSFIELD PARK AND MUMMIES (2009), NORTHANGER ABBEY AND ANGELS AND DRAGONS (2010), and PRIDE AND PLATYPUS: Mr. Darcy’s Dreadful Secret (forthcoming), all part of her Supernatural Jane Austen Series. After many years in Los Angeles, Vera now lives in a small town in Vermont. She uses her Armenian sense of humor and her Russian sense of suffering to bake conflicted pirozhki and make art. In addition to being a writer, philosopher, and award-winning artist, she is also the publisher of Norilana Books. Official website: www.veranazarian.com