I don’t know whether the third edition of Best American Fantasy, which has found a new home with  Underland Press, represents the “best” fantasy, or why it matters whether it’s “American” (meaning, presumably, the United States).  Of course, it’s a cliché for any anthology to proclaim its contents represent a “best of,” and the editors who’ve been doing it for a number of years frequently rely on stories from the usual suspects of authors who mostly all publish in the…

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The January/February Interzone features a very cool, magna-like cover by Warwick Fraser-Coombe; he’ll be doing the cover art for all six issues in 2010, which are intended to be put together to form a larger image. Collect them all and assemble the collage to see exactly what’s up with this. As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with the contents of the magazine, which, by the way, has  returned to a color interior; it’s a very attractive…

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The new Realms of Fantasy coincides with the relaunch (as of December 11, 2009) of an actually informative website since Warren Lapine took over as publisher beginning with the August 2009 issue (and perhaps the fact that  the website of previous owner Sovereign Media was essentially just a placeholder was indicative of the company’s general lack of interest in the magazine that eventually led to its sale). There was a free PDF version of this bimonthly available for a time,…

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McSweeney’s is a quirky quarterly  that  breaks conventional publishing boundaries with each issue devoted to a unique theme, both in terms of editorial content and physical packaging. For McSweeney’s 32, its last issue of 2009, ten contributors were tasked with writing tales specifically set somewhere in the world that take place fifteen years hence in 2024. According to the editors: …we wanted to hear about where we’d be — to see what the world could look like when things had…

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While her work sometimes hints at the fantastic, Lydia Millet isn’t strictly speaking a fantasy writer, certainly not in the sense of questing elves or weird alternate universes, and certainly not as evidenced in her new short story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys.  Yet Millet’s work  is frequently mentioned in genre venues; indeed, one of the stories collected here, “Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov,” (in which the famed inventor of light bulbs and power generation attains metaphysical illumination by continually re-running…

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For this edition of my irregular review of the latest (more or less) short fiction, I thought I’d try something a little different.  Usually I try to focus on the stories that worked the most for me, with maybe some attention on those that didn’t and why; at the same time, I also try to convey a flavor of everything else, if only just to alert you that an author is in the publication without, for any number of reasons,…

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In his for the most part disdainful observations of science fiction as a cultural phenomenon, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, Thomas Disch characterizes Ray Bradbury, among other notable genre authors of the post- WW II generation, as being in “affluent decline” by the 1980s, suffering from “the literary equivalent of repetition compulsion” (122). He also rues that SF is a young man’s game, not because it is physically exhausting, but because the marketplace focuses on a largely juvenile…

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