Third Bear
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Cunningly crafted stories full of wonder and intelligence. VanderMeer proves again why he is so essential and why everybody should be reading him.”
—Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Featuring “The Situation,” a story set in the universe of VanderMeer’s bestseller, Borne.
Compared by critics to Borges, Nabokov, and Kafka, contemporary fantasist Jeff VanderMeer (The Southern Reach Trilogy) continues to amaze with this surreal, innovative, and absurdist gathering of award-winning short fiction. Exotic beasts and improbable travelers roam restlessly through these darkly diverting and finely honed tales.
In "The Situation," a beleaguered office worker creates a child-swallowing manta-ray to be used for educational purposes (once described as Dilbert meets Gormenghast). In "Three Days in a Border Town," a sharpshooter seeks the truth about her husband in an elusive floating city beyond a far-future horizon; "Errata" follows an oddly familiar writer who has marshaled a penguin, a shaman, and two pearl-handled pistols with which to plot the end of the world. Also included are two stories original to this collection, including "The Quickening," in which a lonely child is torn between familial obligation and loyalty to a maligned talking rabbit.
Chimerical and hypnotic, VanderMeer leads readers into a new literature of the imagination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
VanderMeer's seventh collection (after Secret Lives) is a fine introduction to one of our very best contemporary practitioners of the fantastic. In the dark "The Third Bear," an isolated medieval town is beset by a monster that uses the bodies of its victims to create a grisly work of art. "Finding Sonoria" concerns a down-on-his-luck PI hired to find a country that issued a postage stamp but apparently does not exist. The intensely surreal "The Situation" takes place in a company torn by bizarre office politics and dedicated to body modification and the construction of beetles and flying manta rays. "The Goat Variations" is a sophisticated alternate history in which a newly elected U.S. president is briefed on a startling scientific breakthrough with origins not of this world. Fans of slipstream and the interstitial will relish VanderMeer's superb prose, overwhelmingly odd situations, and fascinating, eccentric characters.
