And the Next Guest Editor of BAF Is...

I'm pleased to announce that the guest editor for Best American Fantasy 3 will be Kevin Brockmeier. The book will be filled with stories from this year (2008) and will be published in September 2009.
For the full, official press release (with a rare quote from series editor Matthew Cheney himself!), check out the BAF blog. For information on guidelines and publicity, see the BAF website.

I'm really thrilled Kevin agreed to join our endeavor -- I can't imagine a person who would be more perfect to take over. I'm also thrilled that I was able to convince Ann and Jeff to stay on and help with some publicity and packaging, because there's a lot I still don't know about putting books together, and their experience and knowledge and patience have been essential to the series.

If you don't know Kevin Brockmeier's work ... well, didn't you read his marvelous "Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets" in the first BAF? (If not, it's online here.) Aside from being world-famous for being in the monumental first volume of BAF, Kevin has also written the simply perfect story "The Brief History of the Dead", which he later expanded into a novel. And he wrote the devastating novel The Truth About Celia, which is the work of his I first read -- I happened to tell Kelly Link that I'd heard good things about it, but never read it, and she went and grabbed a copy off a shelf at home, thrust it into my hands, and said, "You must. Now." I did, and she was right.

Kevin's stories have been collected in Things that Fall from the Sky and his new book, The View from the Seventh Layer. If you haven't read any of the tales therein, you're in for a real treat.

We're still selecting the contents for Best American Fantasy 2 right now, and it's due to be released in September. I'll have more information soon about the cover artist for that book, who is, I think, a wonderful discovery, and once we settle on the contents and get the permissions, I'll make the selections and the suggested reading list public, too.

Meanwhile, here are some Kevin Brockmeier links...

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