The Mumpsimus

Rick Bowes has taken to calling me "Garbo" (or, when he's feeling particularly familiar, "Greta"), but it is not true that I am avoiding the world, merely that I am busy with teaching, grading papers, writing lesson plans, etc. As proof, though, of my continued existence, I offer the following:Tonight's Interfictions reading at McNally Robinson, where I will be reading alongside Tempest Bradford, Veronica Schanoes, and Delia Sherman. (I may also channel Theodora Goss, having last achieved this feat two years ago at the World Fantasy Convention, when Dora couldn't make it to a panel.)

A conversation about Best American Fantasy at Booksquare, in which Jeff, Ann, and I throw questions at each other. Many thanks to Kassia Krozser for inviting us to do this!The evidence is before you, my children. Garbo or ... Harpo? You decide!

Hobart is a young literary magazine, and editor Aaron Burch is so excited that a story he published, Catherine Zeidler's "Pregnant", is included in Best American Fantasy that he's named Prime Books to be Hobart's Small Press of the Month and he is willing to send a back issue of Hobart to anybody who orders BAF from now on. (Although I expect he'll have to put some limitations on that, as millions of you are now about to go buy more copies...)

If you're interested in Hobart, be sure to stop by the website ... and do consider subscribing -- it's an attractively-designed magazine with eclectic content (in a good way).

It's likely there won't be much in the way of updates around here for at least a few days, but I have a few fragments of information and marginal bits of thought to share before I go...
John Joseph Adams wrote a nice piece for SciFi Wire about Jeff and Ann VanderMeer's guest editing of Best American Fantasy.

Speaking of Best Americans, all the various ones from various publishers now seem to be out in stores. I stayed up much too late last night, utterly engrossed in The Best American Essays 2007, guest edited by David Foster Wallace. I always find a few essays in that book to be fascinating or impressive, but none of the other volumes I've read have so completely hooked me -- indeed, in all the other volumes I've encountered at least one essay that cured insomnia. That's not the case with this edition. I was reading the first essay, Jo Ann Beard's "Werner", last night at a pizza place across from Cooper Union, and I not only nearly missed the J…

As we got closer to the publication date of Best American Fantasy, I grew anxious to read reviews of the book. My anxieties were relieved early on, when Publisher's Weekly gave us a starred review and NPR put the book on their summer reading list. Visions of bestsellerdom danced in my head. (Well, not quite. I'm not entirely delusional.)

But we knew the book was pretty weird, and not likely to appeal to certain types of readers. I was curious how readers for whom it was not a perfect experience reacted. Soon enough, we heard from a couple of folks who didn't really like the book on the whole, and couldn't connect to, seemingly, any of the stories. These responses were in private, because we asked anybody who even hinted that they had reservations about the book to tell us why -- we were curious to understand how people could not share in our enthusiasm for these stories, and hoped we might learn something from the responses. Not liking a few stories was completel…

It lives!

Yes, a box o' BAF has landed, and yesterday I even delivered the very first contributor's copy to Meghan McCarron, and since Meghan is working during the summer at One Story, we met at the One Story offices and I presented that estimable publication with a copy as well -- they have been enthusiastic supporters of our work from the beginning, and provided us with one story for the book and one story for the recommended list.

Jeff and Ann are sending out the other contributors' copies in the next few days, and the book itself should be available in stores by a week from today. As Jeff notes, if you don't buy your copy from an independent bookseller, please consider picking one up at Borders. They've decided to take a chance on us, and we're grateful.

I've gotten some inquiries from people wondering when, exactly, Best American Fantasy will be available. (When we first came up with the idea of the book, we'd hoped for June, but that was a bit optimistic.)

The book is at the printer and should be leaving there sometime during the coming days, heading off to the distributor and then to retailers. (Or something like that.) With a little bit of luck, it will be in stores by the last moments of July or the first week of August.

Best American Fantasy is the first book I've been completely involved in creating, and it's a book that's been very close to my heart, because I think Ann and Jeff chose a wonderfully diverse group of stories, and the three of us worked very hard to find those stories. Even though we'd love the book no matter what anybody else thought of it, and we know there will inevitably be people who don't much care for the selection, it's thrilling to see the work appreciated -- for instance, with this Publisher's Weeklystarred review:
Best American Fantasy
Edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer.
Prime (www.primebooks.net), $14.95 paper (460p) ISBN 978-0-8095-6280-0

In a genre where yearly “best of” volumes often repeat one another, the first in Prime’s new annual fantasy anthology series is a breath of eclectic and delightfully innovative fresh air. While the VanderMeers have included such fantasy veterans as Kelly Link and Elizabeth Hand, most of the 29 stories …

Galleycat reports that five writers have been nominated by the New York Public Library for the Young Lions Fiction Award, and I was thrilled to see that three of the writers are people whose work will be appearing in our inaugural volume of Best American Fantasy: Chris Adrian, Kevin Brockmeier, and Tony D'Souza. I'm still reading Chris Adrian's amazing novel The Children's Hospital (and likely will be for a while), I reviewed Kevin Brockmeier's The Brief History of the Dead for SF Site, and I just bought a copy of Tony D'Souza's Whiteman, which was edited by the great and glorious Tina Pohlman.

In my copious free time, I hope eventually to start chronicling the awards and accomplishments of all of our BAF contributors at the blog, but for now little blips of congratulations are going to have to suffice. So congratulations to Tony, Kevin, and Chris -- and may you all win!

It gives me great pleasure to be able to announce the contents for the first edition of Best American Fantasy. Head on over to the BAF blog to see. (We'll also be posting excerpts from Ann & Jeff's introduction in a few days.)

BAF represents a tremendous amount of work by a lot of different people, especially Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, who have been tireless readers and organizers. Advance review copies will be going out in a week or two, and the book is currently available for pre-order from both Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

We'll be posting the table of contents for Best American Fantasy in the next few days, and in preparation for that I've put my preface up on the blog. Next week, we'll also be posting the version of Ann & Jeff's introduction that Jeff read at the AWP Conference.

While we're not able to release the table of contents for Best American Fantasy quite yet, we are happy to launch the BAF blog today with our list of 25 recommended stories that for one reason or another are not included in the book itself, though each story was seriously discussed for possible inclusion, and we spent almost as much time determining the recommended list as we did the final contents of the anthology.

We'll be using the BAF blog for occasional updates, and, once we get closer to the June publication date of the book, I hope we'll be able to offer some fun extras. In the meantime, congratulations to all of the authors and publishers of stories on the recommended list. If we learned anything by putting the book together this year, it's that there is an extraordinary amount of excellent fiction out there -- far more than could fit in one anthology -- and it comes in a tremendous variety of forms and styles.

This blog has been more sporadic and had less content in the past couple months than I would like, but life got suddenly very busy in a bunch of different ways, and I'm still playing catch-up. But some stuff is winding down, and I'm hoping to be able to make things a bit more consistent and varied around here within the next month or so. In the meantime, here are some almost-random fragments of whateverness...
It's Wizard of the Crow Week over at the LitBlog Co-op. Most, if not all, of my blogging this week will be over there. We've already posted the first part of a roundtable discussion, and we'll have more parts going up later, as well as some contests for people to win copies of the book, a podcast interview with Ngugi, and various other fun things.

We're putting the finishing touches on Best American Fantasy and have put out a call for submissions and recommendations for the second volume. The book is currently available for pre-order from Amazon and fr…

Over at the LitBlog Co-op is an annoucement of this quarter's Read This! selection, a book that I utterly adore. (And I just about utterly adore one of the other nominees, too, so it seemed to me like one of the stronger quarters the LBC has had in a while. I'll have a lot more to say later.)

Things are likely to be slow here this week (as if they haven't been for the past few weeks...) because we're finishing up work on Best American Fantasy, which is shaping up to be a pretty durn interesting anthology, methinks, and one unlike any other out there. (Not that I'm biased or anything.)

Speaking of BAF, Jeff VanderMeer (who also recommends the LBC pick) has posted his thoughts on some of what we've encountered while reading. I'm still thinking about all this, trying to have something resembling a coherent thought after reading and discussing piles of stories, so I'm going to refrain from saying anything for right now other than that basically I concur w…