I'm currently reading yet another short-story anthology, Ravens in the Library, Magic in the Bard's Name. It's a huge book jam-packed with very short stories, poems, etc. that are vaguely themed around storytelling, personal change, music, birds, or anything else vaguely bardic. I'm maybe 10 stories in, and already some of the stories are stuck sideways in my head (for good and bad reasons).

The Charles de Lint story about what happens when a fiddle player meets the Devil at a metaphysical crossroads is more interesting for what doesn't happen than for what does. I enjoyed that quite a bit. A huffy Satan calling someone else a liar is just cute somehow.

The story of a mother trapped in her life and solving that trapped feeling by abandoning her toddler at a rest stop hurt.

The story about an 11-year-old girl who is trapped by normalcy in Walnut Creek and "marries" a poi-spinning wizard could have had a horrible ending. The last sentence really turned it around for me, and left me smiling with her.