Buried Deep and Other Stories

by Naomi Novik

is full of lies. Not the stories; the stories are as true as I could make them when I wrote them, but the introductions. When I’m finished writing something, it leaves me; if I tell you anything about these stories, the chances are extremely good that I made it up when an editor or an interviewer asked me, months or years after I wrote the actual story, and now I misremember it as what I was thinking at the time, or it’s what I think of them now, reading them again at a distance in some cases of decades. The real truth is that only the stories themselves can tell you what I was thinking. If I could put one of them into a few neat and tidy paragraphs, I wouldn’t have bothered to write a story. There are no shortcuts in the Labyrinth.

My house growing up was full of words; my mother read widely. She had a specific taste in romance novels: thin and smooth, to be drunk up like a glass of wine in the evening and the empties taken back to the used bookstore in large bags to exchange for a case of new ones, or ones that had been read long enough ago to be good to taste all over again.

It is never wise to offend foreign deities, no matter how many good old-fashioned British fairies one might have invited to the wedding.

while her peers were entering into society as polished young ladies, beginning their study of banking or medicine, Lady Araminta was confirmed only as a sportswoman of excessive skill, with all the unfortunate results heretofore described.

In reality, the line between lady and lord was distressingly thin.

He would not have minded in the least to be asked for the whole tale, but Araminta was too much concerned with her own circumstances to care at all about his.

Araminta understood perfectly, and understood also that her prepared answers were all wrong. The goddess was not offering a little favor, a charm to hide her or a key to unlock chains, or even a way off the island; the goddess was asking a question, and the question had to be answered truly.

There were no striga or caranya or leszy or anything else truly terrible.

Other than that, she knew he liked football and computer games, although that seemed to be what came in every box called boy that she had met here in school,