Will Shetterly

His early teen years in the 1960s fraught with the period's interplay of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, Christopher Nix is invited by a mysterious benefactor to attend an exclusive private school, where he discovers his hidden supernatural destiny.

Seventeen-year-old Ron, now turned into a wolfboy by a spell, finds Bordertown filled with kidnapping, murder, and magic, as gangs of elves continue to search for the heir of Faerie.

Bordertown: a city on the border between our human world and the elfin realm. Runaway teens come from both sides of the border to find adventure, and to find themselves. Elves play in rock bands and race down the street on spell-powered motorbikes. Human kids recreate themselves in squats and clubs and artist's studios of Soho. Authors including Holly Black, Cassandra Clare, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, Catherynne M. Valente, all meet here on the streets of Bordertown in more than twenty new interconnected songs, poems and stories.

This work is the author's memoir of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape. Anyone familiar with the author's fiction will recognize Gloversville, New York, once famous for producing that eponymous product and anything else made of leather. This is where the author grew up, the only son of an aspirant mother and a good-time, second-fiddle father who were born into this close-knit community. But by the time of his childhood in the 1950s, prosperity was inexorably being replaced by poverty and illness (often tannery-related), everyone barely scraping by under a very low horizon. A world elsewhere was the dream his mother instilled in Rick, and strived for herself, and their subsequent adventures and tribulations, recounted here, only to prove lifelong, as would Gloversville's fearsome grasp on them both.

A wizard's dozen is a magical number - sometimes twelve, sometimes more - of something fantastic. In the case of this volume, it is a collection of thirteen spellbinding tales that together make a heady brew of wonder and enchantment. - from inside front cover

Reprint: Originally published: New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, ©2003