Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition (FANTASY BEST OF THE YEAR) - Softcover

Horton's fantasy annual showcases the best short speculative fiction that steps beyond the established boundaries of science. The 16 selections represent both magic-oriented fantasy and cross-genre slipstream fiction (see also Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, 2006). Their inspired and resourceful authors range from veteran fantasists Geoff Ryman and Peter S. Beagle to such newer voices as Matthew Corradi and Ysabeau Wilce. Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, contributes a morbidly amusing piece about a ghost who falls in love with a mortal woman while somehow keeping his disembodied condition secret. Matthew Johnson describes a culture so linguistically adept that it constructs entire vocabularies for individual couples. Other tales explore alternate-history versions of California, a land where fish can fly, and the fate of an old sailor who rescues a merman with a bewitching wine recipe. Fantasy enthusiasts looking for stories that expand the genre's boundaries in unexpected ways will find them in this inventive, enticingly provocative collection. Hays, Carl

Horton fittingly describes lyricism as the quality linking his selections for the best fantasy stories of 2006. The morosely poetic A Fine Magic by Margo Lanagan pits two attractive sisters against a spurned suitor's wizardly wrath; Jeffrey Ford's brilliantly understated The Night Whiskey is a dark fantasy gem about a rural village whose residents commune with the dead; M. Rickert's dreamlike masterwork, Journey into the Kingdom follows a forlorn man who becomes enamored with a mysterious painter and her fantastical history; Benjamin Rosenbaum's contemplative A Siege of Cranes arguably the anthology's most poetic and profoundly moving entry, depicts an improbable journey of retribution across a devastated wonderland of magic and myth.
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