“A smart, stark steampunk fantasy.  It’s gritty and magical and, in sensibility, is similar to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere and MirrorMask….Original and dashing, The Dragons of Babel is a breath of fresh air.”
--Starlog  

"This is modern fantasy at its finest and should hold great appeal for fans of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. . . ."
--Publishers Weekly, (starred review)

“Dark, subversive, inventive, challenging, outrageous, and very funny… has to be a contender for one of the best fantasy novels of the year.”
--Interzone

“Swanwick's expert craftsmanship gives his fiction a brilliant, highly polished surface.”
--The Philadelphia Inquirer

“The Dragons of Babel will immediately capture readers’ interest…. Earthy, bawdy, and often brutal, it’s a story that will keep science fiction/fantasy fans involved till the end.”
--School Library Journal (starred review)

“Swanwick’s major accomplishment here—aside from his standard authorial equipment of finely honed prose, inventive plotting, engaging characters and clever symbolical patterning—is to instantiate a world where BMWs and motorcycles can be parked side by side with hippogriffs and manticores without rendering either “vehicle” ridiculous…The ride you get from [Swanwick’s] dragons will be like no other.”
--Sci Fi Weekly (grade A)

“Witty, inventive, written with enormous flair, this is one of Swanwick’s most complex and rewarding novels.”
--Asimov’s

“If you haven’t read Michael Swanwick yet, you’ve been missing some wonderful prose…Con men and ward heelers, cluricauns and hobgoblins, and a stunningly beautiful elf-woman who rides a hippogriff all entire and enrapture Will, and the reader as well.”
--The San Diego Union-Tribune

“I no longer read much fantasy, but would return to it in a Babel minute if I could find more like this: elegant, erudite, slyly funny, hard-nosed, compassionate, propulsive, and capable of punching through overused conventions and sentimentalities and delivering the jolt that restores the form to its primal power.”
--Locus