The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection - Softcover

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9780312206864: The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312206860 ISBN 13: 9780312206864

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 1999

Over 250,000 words of the finest fantasy and horror

A. S. Byatt
Charles de Lint
Karen Joy Fowler
Neil Gaiman
Lisa Goldstein
Stephen King
Ellen Kushner
Patricia A. McKillip
Steven Millhauser
Michael Marshall Smith
Peter Straub
Jane Yolen

For more than a decade, readers have looked to The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror to showcase the highest achievements of fantastic fiction. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling continue their critically acclaimed and award-winning tradition with another stunning collection of stories. The fiction and poetry here is culled from an exhaustive survey of the field, nearly four dozen stories ranging from fairy tales to gothic horror, from magical realism to dark tales in the Grand Guignol style. Rounding out the volume are the editors' invaluable overviews of the year in fantastic fiction, and a long list of Honorable Mentions, making this volume a valubale reference source as well as the best reading available in fantasy and horror

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror annuals are always a treat; read this one and The Year's Best Science Fiction Sixteenth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois and you'll have a fairly complete overview of speculative fiction from 1998 as well as hours of great reading.

Datlow and Windling, renowned for crossing genre boundaries, gather stories and poems from mainstream magazines, literary journals, and Internet zines. There are vampires, a Lovecraft homage, enchanted birds and animals, shapeshifters, adult fairy tales, ghosts, and even a hunted muse. The best are Byatt's sensuous, enchanting "Cold"--about an ice princess who marries a glass-blowing desert prince--and Straub's novella, "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff" (which won the Stoker award for Best Long Fiction in 1999), a black comedy of revenge gone awry. The reference material includes each editor's review of the year's best novels, collections and anthologies, magazines, related nonfiction, children's books, and art. There's also a roundup of 1998's film, television, and dramatic offerings by Ed Bryant, a brief essay on comics by Seth Johnson, and obituaries by James Frenkel.

It's an invaluable source of introductions to authors you might not otherwise try, plus thought-provoking observations on fantasy in all its guises. You may not get to a convention this year, but if you've read Datlow and Windling, you'll know what a good one is like. --Nona Vero

From the Publisher:

This volume includes stores from:

Jorge Luis Borges
Chana Bloch
Michael Blumlein
Catharine Savage Brosman
Sylvia Brownrigg
Judy Budnitz
A. S. Byatt
Susanna Clarke
Sarah Corbett
Charles de Lint
Marisa de los Santos
Nick DiChario
Terry Dowling
Carol Ann Duffy
Steve Duffy
Sara Douglass
Dennis Etchison
Larry Fontenot
Karen Joy Fowler
Neil Gaiman
Bruce Glassco
Lisa Goldstein
Christopher Harman
Rick Kennett
John Kessel
Stephen King
Ellen Kushner
Terry Lamsley
Kelly Link
Patricia A. McKillip
Steven Millhauser
Lawrence Osgood
Norman Partridge
Holly Prado
Mary Rosenblum
Ralph Salisbury
Delia Sherman
Michael Marshall Smith
Ilan Stavans
Peter Straub
Mark W. Tiedemann
Ray Vukcevich
Jane Yolen
Kurahashi Yukimo