Review to come :)

I can understand why this is a classic - it's a lovely introduction to the world, every story building out a little more as well as introducing great characters.

I read this book as a teenager, a 15-yr-old angsty boy struggling with ADHD, in desperate need of an escape. This book will always have a special place in my heart, and heavily influenced me as a writer.

First, I want to thank my local library for tracking down a copy of this for me to read. You guys rock.So why only three stars? Personal taste, largely. I'm not at all trying to say it hasn't earned its rep, because I think it really has. But I'm coming at it 30 years after it was written, after reading a ton of stuff written by people inspired by this book. Even if I didn't devour it in one sitting, I'm still really glad I got a chance to read it.This is the first book in a famous series of ant...

I read these books twice as a teenager and I still have my original copies! It's one of my favorite series and even after all these years I still remember a lot of the stories and characters. ***Update***I just got The Essential Bordertown so I am re-reading the series.

Really interesting to see where the genre of YA urban fantasy began. There was this multi-page description of an abandoned US Bank in an elf wood that had trees growing around it that was clearly like, this revolutionary depiction of magic and industrialization mingling that was supposed to ABSOLUTELY BLOW READERS’ MINDS, and I found it very charming. Definitely a product of its time, and there were some things that really made me cringe, but I blasted through this collection and had a great tim...

I feel like this is quite dated nowadays, it feels very 80s but in a way that's nice having read how important this series was to outcasts in the 80s. Definitely worth a read for fans of urban fantasy to see where the amazing genre originated from! The only shame for me was that just as I was becoming interested and getting attached to all the students the stories would finish...

I was just the right age for these when they came out...

I think I read this book for the first time when I was 15 or 16. It was a discarded copy which had the cover torn off. It had a black spine with white lettering, but I loved this book. I read it, re-read it and read it again. There was just something really attractive about a gritty future world with future-tech and fantasy. In my teenaged brain, it's was like a Reese's peanut butter cup: two great tastes that taste great together. In the past 26 years, I've never been able to find another copy

I read this after having read the newest book in the Bordertown universe, Welcome to Bordertown, and despite my fears that this first book might feel too dated it was just as good. Sure, there's definitely things that place it in the 80's like band references, but the stories themselves felt like they could have belonged any time. There's only four stories in this collection, but I enjoyed all of them. I'm always kind of wary of shared universes, but Bordertown is really well down and has a lot

Borderland is the very first installation in the series of the same name—a corpus of shared-world short stories and novels which collectively serves as a foundational text for the urban fantasy genre. Written in the 1980s, the books meld punk sensibilities and old-world high-fantasy glamour.Borderland (this volume) is an anthology of four pieces of short fiction by Steven R. Boyet, Terri Windling writing as Bellamy Bach, Charles De Lint and Ellen Kushner. As with Bordertown, which I read and rev...

Even though this book is a slim volume, and contains only four short stories, it serves as an excellent introduction to the shared world of Bordertown created by Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold. I’ve previously read many of the later volumes set in the magical town which straddles the border between the normal world and the recently-returned faerieland (the small print run of this early urban fantasy book makes it tricky to find at the public library), so I was delighted to finally get a cha...

I enjoyed this book almost as much as Emma Bull's Finder. My favourite story is Stick by Charles De Lint... I wanted more yet it was just right as it is, leaving some mystery as to the future for the characters.

Bought when it was first published, I read and re-read the book, and hoped for more. Somehow I missed seeing them until now.Go, Goodreads!This anthology was an eye-opener, full of new ideas. I loved it. One thing I particularly remember was Wolf-boy finding four-leaf clovers and using them to buy things. Awesome!When the book first came out, I was already well beyond my teenage years, and never had contemplated running away from home. This book introduced the thought that maybe people run away f...

Eighties mythic urban fantasy that, almost more than War of the Oaks, sets the tone for the rest of the genre. The prose is merely serviceable, the characters likable but uncomplicated, but the aesthetic of Celtic punk rock, elf/human gang warfare, and glamorous urban decay absolutely succeeds. You can understand why this series inspired its own new wave/nerd subculture back in the eighties.The first three stories are very much cut of the same cloth, but Kushner's last story is a welcome surpris...

ONE STAR for the first three stories, FOUR STARS for the last (and shortest by far) by Ellen Kushner; split the difference and it's TWO STARS -- aka I don't see myself re-reading this book, except maybe Kushner's "Charis?" But even then, eh. I grew up on the Bordertown books and anthologies, but never found this installment before. Maybe it suffers through the lens of adulthood and how fantasy has matured over the thirty years since it was published. But "Charis" convinces me it was more of a sh...

The first of the Borderland books. What a ride.Such a great anthology with riveting characters and a world in which I could lose myself for days, and have done so on many an occasion since its discovery.Windling was a genious to put this together and it resonates alongside the other Urban Fantasies that seem to pop into existence around the same time.

A lot of fun - I'm looking forward to reading more in the series.

This is one of those books I'd always heard about, but never been able to track down. Finally, last year, Greg at Dreamhaven books sold me a battered old copy so I could see what everyone was talking about. This is a "shared world" anthology, about a place called "The Borderlands," where the world of elves and magic has inexplicably merged with the "real" world. The short stories take place in various time periods after the merger. Each of the stories builds a bit of the "mythology" of the serie...

Given that this was a fast read, it still managed to intertwine the poetic with the grim, the fantastical with the purely pedantic. I thoroughly enjoyed the connectivity between four authors' tales as set at different times in the Borderland region. The subtle (and not so demure) personalities are set against a backdrop as diverse as they are. At less than 300 pages, one still manages to come to know the characters and vie for their quests for knowledge, power and truth. It is post-modern meets