Year's Best Fantasy & Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection (Year's Best Fantasy & Horror #17)

For more than a decade, readers have turned to The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror to find the most rewarding fantastic short stories.

Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and Gavin Grant 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 fantasy and horror and Year's Best sections — on comics, by Charles Vess, and on anime and manga, by Joan D. Vinge and on film and television by Edward Bryant. This is an indispensable reference as well as the best reading available in fantasy and horror. Contributors include:

• Terry Bisson
• Kevin Brockmeier
• Dan Chaon
• Peter Crowther
• Theodora Goss
• Daphne Gottlieb
• Glen Hirshberg
• Brian Hodge
• Nina Kiriki Hoffman
• Kij Johnson
• Paul LaFarge
• Thomas Ligotti
• Sara Maitland
• Maureen F. McHugh
• Steve Rasnic Tem
• Benjamin Rosenbaum
• Michael Marshall Smith
• Michael Swanwick
• Karen Traviss
• Megan Whalen Turner

"The proliferation of specialty fantasy publications with short runs and low profiles, combined with the growing pervasiveness of fantasy and horror in mainstream markets that elude genre enthusiasts, has made this annual culling increasingly vital for readers who seek the best in fantastic fiction. Datlow (the horror half) teams with new co-editors (who assume fantasy detail once handled by Terri Windling) and the series doesn't skip a beat in quality, delivering 43 stories and poems published in 2003 that illustrate modern fantasy's breadth and variety. Stephen King is represented by 'Harvey's Dream,' an eerie tale of a precognitive dream's disruption of an ordinary suburban household. Karen Joy Fowler, in 'King Rat,' and Ursula K. Le Guin, in 'Woeful Tales from the Mahigul,' make suffering the grist of powerful folk tales. Stories by Michael Swanwick, Neil Gaiman and Dan Chaon stretch traditional genre themes in intriguing new directions. Likewise, the one dominant theme that shapes the contents of this year's volume — the zeitgeist of a post-9/11 world — gets memorably varied treatments from several contributors. Lucius Shepard conjures ghosts from the ruins of the World Trade Center for a consoling tale of redemption in 'Only Partly Here,' while Brian Hodge evokes an all-consuming evil in the battlefields of Afghanistan in 'With Acknowledgments to Sun Tzu.' Wartime paranoia is implicit in two subtly crafted fables, M. Rickert's 'Bread and Bombs' and George Saunders's 'The Red Bow.' Like the other selections, these stories are proof that the best fantastic fiction is modern mythmaking at its finest." Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"The variety of this top-flight annual never fails to appeal, in part because it covers so much material....There are over 40 entries here, in a collection not to be missed by anyone seriously interested in fantasy or horror." Kirkus Reviews

"Link and Grant's good taste in outre setups, stylistic and formal adventurousness, and ambiguity shows in such challenging selections as Adam Corbin Fusco's 'N0072-JK1,' Philip Raines and Harvey Welles' 'The Fishie,' and John Woodward's poem 'At the Mythical Beast.'" Booklist

"The most extensive and reliable guide to the field available." Realms of Fantasy

Ellen Datlow is the acclaimed editor of such anthologies as Blood is Not Enough, Little Deaths, Alien Sex, Vanishing Acts, and the forthcoming The Dark: New Ghost Stories. She has won the Hugo Award for Best Editor once and the World Fantasy Award six times. She and Terri Windling also won The Bram Stoker Award for The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Thirteenth Annual Collection. She lives in New York City and currently edits fiction for Scifi.com.

Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant started Small Beer Press in 2000. They have published the zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet ("tiny, but celebrated" — Washington Post) for seven years. They live in an old farmhouse in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Kelly Link's first collection of short stories, Stranger Things Happen, was selected as a Best Book of the Year by Salon, Locus, and the Village Voice. Stories from the collection have won the Nebula, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Awards. Her most recent short stories have appeared in Conjunctions and McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. She is the editor of the anthology Trampoline and is currently working on more short stories.

Originally from Scotland, Gavin J. Grant worked in bookshops in Los Angeles and Boston and BookSense.com, a website for independent bookshops. He regularly reviews fantasy and science fiction. Publications where his work has appeared include Scifiction, Strange Horizons, The Third Alternative, Singularity, and The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror.