Future Treasures: Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One, edited by Laird Barron
There’s lots of great news in this post. So grab some coffee, find a seat, and pay attention.
A few months back, the folks at Undertow Publications, an imprint of the fabulous ChiZine, launched an Indiegogo funding campaign for a brand new anthology of weird fiction: Year’s Best Weird Fiction. The campaign wrapped up in September and was a rousing success. (Good news!)
In fact, it was successful enough that the anthology is planned to be an annual affair. (Good news!) And as the editor of the first volume, the publishers have selected none other than the talented Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, The Croning, and The Light is the Darkness. (Great news!) Here’s the book description:
Each volume of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction will feature a different guest editor. Along with 125,000 words of the finest strange fiction from the previous year, each volume will include an introduction from the editor, a year in review column, and a short list of other notable stories.
Once the purview of esoteric readers, Weird fiction is enjoying wider popularity. Throughout its storied history there has not been a dedicated volume of the year’s best weird writing. There are a host of authors penning weird and strange tales that defy easy categorization. Tales that slip through genre cracks. A yearly anthology of the best of these writings is long overdue. So . . . welcome to the Year’s Best Weird Fiction.
Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One will be published August 19, 2014 by Undertow Publications. I don’t have a projected page count, but it will cost $17.95 in trade paperback. The cover art is by Santiago Caruso, with design by Vince Haig. Learn more at ChiZine.
My favorite contemporary author editing my favorite genre–I’m thinking (hoping) that this will be the Platonic Form of weird anthology.
James,
I’m hopeful as well. I’m highly intrigued that this is being marketed as a “weird fiction” anthology, rather than a fantasy anthology.
To me that means it will embrace the American Weird Fiction tradition as loosely defined by early Weird Tales — dark fantasy, sword & Sorcery, and horror.
However, I have no idea if that’s how the editor (and the publishers) see it. We’ll see!
Since there doesn’t seem to be a list of authors given, and since Barron has never edited an anthology before (I think he edited an online horror magazine for a short while), I’m INCREDIBLY interested to see what this will be about.
Since I should be done with doctoral junk by August (when it’s scheduled to be released), maybe I can do a review of it (hint hint).
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[…] blurbed Laird Barron’s acclaimed new Year’s Best anthology, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One (above right), back in March, and John R. Fultz provided the complete table of contents for us in […]
[…] admit that I’d never heard of Undertow books before March of this year, when they announced they’d be publishing the first volume of a new Year’s Best collection, Year’s Best […]