The Big Book of Modern Fantasy
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
WORLD FANTASY AWARD WINNER • A true horde of fantasy tales sure to delight fans, scholars, and even the greediest of dragons—from bestselling authors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Step through a shimmering portal ... a worn wardrobe door ... a schism in sky ... into a bold new age of fantasy. When worlds beyond worlds became a genre unto itself. From the swinging sixties to the strange, strange seventies, the over-the-top eighties to the gnarly nineties—and beyond, into the twenty-first century—the VanderMeers have found the stories and the writers from around the world that reinvented and revitalized the fantasy genre after World War II. The stories in this collection represent twenty-two different countries, including Russia, Argentina, Nigeria, Columbia, Pakistan, Turkey, Finland, Sweden, China, the Philippines, and the Czech Republic. Five have never before been translated into English.
From Jorge Luis Borges to Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Moorcock to Angela Carter, Terry Pratchett to Stephen King, the full range and glory of the fantastic are on display in these ninety-one stories in which dragons soar, giants stomp, and human children should still think twice about venturing alone into the dark forest.
Completing Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's definitive The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, this companion volume to takes the genre into the twenty-first century with ninety-one astonishing, mind-bending stories.
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This encyclopedic anthology picks up where the VanderMeers' The Big Book of Classic Fantasy left off, offering a staggering 91 fantasy shorts published between 1946 and 2010. In the introduction, the VanderMeers define fantasy as "any story in which an element of the unreal permeates the real world or any story that takes place in a secondary world that is identifiably not a version of ours." This encompasses undeniable masterworks, including Vladimir Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols" and Gabriel Garc a Marquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," but is too broad a theme to unify the anthology as a whole. Instead, the VanderMeers offer a sweeping survey, highlighting stories by genre greats (Ursula K. Le Guin, Terry Pratchet), modern titans (Stephen King, Victor Lavalle, George R.R. Martin, Haruki Murakami) and beloved cult figures (Leonora Carrington, Angela Carter) and celebrating lesser-known works in translation, including Pakistani legend Intizar Hussain's "Kaya-Kalp (Metamorphosis)," Guyanese novelist Edgar Mittelholzer's "Poolwana's Orchid," and the first English translations of stories by Mexican author Alberto Chimal, Swedish author Marie Hermanson, and Polish author Marta Kisiel. Though the anthology's size and scope will intimidate casual readers, anyone with a scholarly interest in the evolution of the genre will find this a treasure trove.
