Featuring the World Fantasy Award Winning story "The Bird Catcher," OTHER EDENS is a collection of five genre-defying novellas by Thai author-composer S.P. Somtow, author of the acclaimed "Jasmine Nights" and "Dragon's Fin Soup." From 1st Century Palestine to the baroque perplexities of the American South and postwar Siam, with characters from the Virgin Mary to a Chinese serial killer, the stories explore the idea of alternate paradises and provide astonishing, sometimes shocking, perspectives about humanity's yearning for a better place.

Here are eight of World Fantasy Award winner S.P. Somtow's most controversial stories, including three previously uncollected ones. Each deals with a "sacred cow" of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and subjects it to the pitiless scrutiny of historian, mythographer, and fantasist. Violent, sometimes kinky, these stories nevertheless reach surprising epiphanies about faith and redemption. A curiously sympathetic Antichrist hunts down the next messiah with the aid of a unicorn. St Paul ponders about whether, in order to make his miraculous new religion work, he needs to get rid of an inconvenient Jesus. An entertainment mogul in ancient Rome figures out how to cut costs by staging resurrections in the arena. Lot's daughter has managed to survive as a vampire and pours out her heart in an incest survivors' support group.... These aren't the Bible stories you learned in Sunday school - yet they raise many of the questions you may not have dared ask there.Between them the eight stories in this book were nominated for ten awards, including Bram Stokers, International Horror Guild Awards, and an Asimov's Magazine Reader Poll.

..".the J.D. Salinger of Siam"
--George Axelrod, Oscar-winning screenwriter of "Breakfast at Tiffany's"

"S. P. Somtow doesn't write like anybody else...and when he wants to spook you, he can drive the chill bone deep."
--Dean Koontz

In an exotic re-telling of the fairytale of Bluebeard, a New Age thirty-something is swept off her feet by an enigmatic Thai millionaire and soon finds herself in Bangkok's brave new world of shamans, shopping malls, and high society serial killers.

Originally written as a cliff-hanging serial for Bangkok's "The Nation" newspaper, "Bluebeard's Castle" is a roller-coaster novel that leapfrogs from genre to genre and culture to culture, turning the western preconception of Bangkok as a "city of temples and prostitutes" on its ear. A darkly comic odyssey populated with wild characters, with intimate glimpses into a culture rarely written about.

..".the J.D. Salinger of Siam"
--George Axelrod, Oscar-winning screenwriter of "Breakfast at Tiffany's"

"S. P. Somtow doesn't write like anybody else...and when he wants to spook you, he can drive the chill bone deep."
--Dean Koontz

In an exotic re-telling of the fairytale of Bluebeard, a New Age thirty-something is swept off her feet by an enigmatic Thai millionaire and soon finds herself in Bangkok's brave new world of shamans, shopping malls, and high society serial killers.

Originally written as a cliff-hanging serial for Bangkok's "The Nation" newspaper, "Bluebeard's Castle" is a roller-coaster novel that leapfrogs from genre to genre and culture to culture, turning the western preconception of Bangkok as a "city of temples and prostitutes" on its ear. A darkly comic odyssey populated with wild characters, with intimate glimpses into a culture rarely written about.