The Long and Short of It

There are good days and there are bad days: those days when I figure there's no point getting out of bed. The bad days also include times when I figure that I'm writing crap and totally irrelevant-to-the-world stuff, including whatever I put in this blog.

Maybe it's the weather. Maybe I'm just feeling the doldrums. Whatever the case, that's when I normally turn to my books. Which explains my rather expansive library and my long, long list of books still to be read.

At this point in time, I find some solace in books on short stories, whether anthologies or single-author collections. I'd blame dean's influence of course but funny enough, all these stories actually helped jumpstart my writing brain to shift to the short form. (So if you don't like my stories, you can actually still blame dean!)

Seriously, the good news is that getting these anthologies is a good buy: you get the best of the lot, it's collected in a good format, and the varied range of the stories means that you won't get stuck with a bad story-- as, say in a novel or even by a story collection by a single author.

At the time I started, there was only one definitive collection of fantasy stories-- that of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's Year's Best of Fantasy and Horror-- unlike science-fiction, which had a number of year's best collections. Fortunately, there seems to be a plethora of year's best collections presently. As of last count, there were five:

1. Fantasy: The Best of the Year, edited by prolific reviewer Rich Horton;
2. Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005, edited by Jonathan Strahan;
3. Best New Fantasy, edited by small press publisher Sean Wallace;
4. Year's Best Fantasy, David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer; and
5. The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror but now edited by Ellen Datlow, Gavin Grant and Kelly Link.

The bad news is that it seems the best-of short-story anthology market seems to be a little shaky. Before, the Hartwell/Crame antho was published by one of the big publishing houses, Eos Books. Unfortunately, this was discontinued and now their antho is now in the hands of an independent press, Tachyon Publications. (Serendipitously enough, an antho I ordered before Feeling Very Strange actually came from them.) Likewise, the Strahan antho was almost discontinued by the demise of iBooks but it was later picked up by Locus Press.

So how does it compare? Well, I have none of the aforementioned books in hand yet. (Though I aim to get the Datlow collection since I'm already knee-deep in it; the rest-- alas, though the books look lovely, there are more books out there than I can spend on so we'll have to see.) However, I did try reading up on last year's selection, i.e. stories from 2004:

1. David Hartwell, Kathryn Cramer Year's Best Fantasy 5
2. Karen Haber, Jonathan Strahan Fantasy: The Best of 2004
3. Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, Gavin Grant Year's Best of Fantasy and Horror 18th Annual Collection

The Datlow collection is the epitome of what's really out there: aside from the editors' selection of the best of the best in both fantasy and horror, it also has a summary on all the stuff published as of that year. However, the editors' bias is quite evident as they prefer their fantasy to be more on the weird/interstitial/magical realism side. On the other hand, the Hartwell collection adheres to the magical/genre fantasy that I must admit I'm used to but it does rather limit itself a bit to this. However, I do like both collections as it cites writers (like Kevin Brockmeier and Theodora Goss) that I might have never known about if I hadn't picked these up.

Lastly, I always thought Strahan's collection was at a disadvantage since it's usually the first year's best to come out ('round mid-year?). However, Strahan doesn't miss much in his selection and if ever you want to know what's out there but can't spend much, then this is your book. Likewise, all three books had little overlaps so if you're leery of spending on books that have the same content, don't worry too much about that.

I don't know how the new antho editors will handle their selections but I'm thinking that Horton and Wallace know their stuff. And hopefully I can procure a copy of all five books eventually.

In meantime, if you want to cheer up a depressed cat, now you know what you can get me (certain books being already available on these shores). *winks*

Edited to add:

Here's a nice review of all the anthologies. Makes me think that I should really go out and get these... *sigh*