This is a theme that has been eagerly embraced by fiction and folklore, and world literature is full of star-crossed lovers desperately struggling to hold on to love no matter how overwhelming the odds against them: Paris and Helen, Pyramus and Thisbe, Lancelot and Guinevere, Roxanne and Cyrano, Cathy and Heathcliff. Recently, thanks to the booms in fantasy and romance, everyone knows of Buffy and Angel, Bill Compton and Sookie Stackhouse, Edward Cullen and Bella Swan.

Which brings us down to the book you hold in your hands at this moment (unless you’re using your mental powers to make it levitate or reading it off a screen), a cross-genre anthology called Songs of Love & Death, which explores the borderlands of fantasy and romance, stories from the heart and about the heart, tales of endangered love played out against every kind of setting, from ghost-haunted fantasy landscapes to mile-long spaceships in transit between the stars, stories where a lover’s heart is put in danger, and love, life, and happiness are at risk with great odds to be overcome to achieve them. Star-crossed lovers who are really star-crossed, with grave obstacles to be overcome before they succeed in finding love (if they do): a wizard who must battle both a supremely powerful vampire and the hidden desires of his own heart; a man who must seduce a reluctant maiden or forfeit his family’s life to the Queen of Faerie; a woman who falls in love with a superhero she glimpses hurtling toward the scene of a crime; a ghost who lusts for sex and blood long after he should be safely in his grave; a girl who must brave the wrath of an otherworldly prince to rescue the man she loves; a lonely man who falls in love with a woman he can never meet; a smuggler who dares to fall in love with the ruler of a star-spanning Empire; a soldier cast adrift from his world who will face immense hardships to return to his own time and place; a lover who may—or may not—exist; a love that persists across lives and worlds, and transcends death . . .