Edited By
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
<p>In dozens of anthologies published over the last thirty years, the words “edited by” have been followed by a singularly reassuring name: Ellen Datlow. For countless readers (and writers), Datlow’s name has served as a virtual guarantee of quality. Each of her many anthologies, whatever its specific nature, reflects a high degree of taste, intelligence, and professional judgment. As Gary K. Wolfe notes in his excellent introduction, her work has received “an almost unprecedented string of honors.” Honors and awards are fine, of course, but it’s the stories that ultimately matter. And Datlow has ushered more good stories into the world than any editor in living memory. The book you are currently holding stands as a testament to that fact.</p>
<p>Edited By is a thoroughgoing attempt to reflect both the quality and infinite variety of the fiction she has championed in the course of her career. The stories gathered here come from all over the literary map. There are SF, fantasy, and horror stories, often in unique combinations. There are household names among the contributors, such as Neil Gaiman, whose screenplay/story “Eaten (Scenes from a Moving Picture)” is a chilling account of eater and eaten, predator and prey. There are newer, lesser known figures as well, among them Nathan Ballingrud, whose “Monsters of Heaven” is an achingly beautiful story of grief, loss, and strange encounters. And there are many award-winning writers included, among them Elizabeth Hand, Kelly Link, Lucius Shepard, Ted Chiang, and Jeffrey Ford, to name just a few. Their contributions are among the many highlights of this book.</p>
<p>Edited By is one of those rare books that offers intense pleasure and intellectual excitement on every page. There are no bad stories here, and there is no lazy or indifferent writing. Some of the finest imaginative fiction of modern times awaits within the covers of this magisterial book. This one really does belong on the permanent shelf. Don’t let it pass you by.</p>
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This impressive doorstopper collects stories from 30 previous anthologies assembled by prolific and influential speculative fiction editor Datlow, with brief notes on her selection process offering deep insight into how one editor can shape a genre. The oldest entry, Pat Murphy's charming "Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates," a post-apocalyptic story with a hopeful bent, appeared in 1990's Alien Sex, and the most recent, Priya Sharma's "The Crow Palace," a darkly fantastic story about corvids and changelings, was collected in 2017's Black Feathers. The standouts are often the longer works, notably Ted Chiang's spectacular novella "Seventy-Two Letters," a Victorian-era alternate history that melds the experiments of Frankenstein with golemlike automata. Many of the pieces blur genre boundaries and are linked by their dark undertones and focus on transgressive acts. (Indeed, sensitive readers should be warned that this anthology contains nearly every trauma imaginable.) Though the writing is universally strong, some of the older stories, including "In the Month of Athyr" by Elizabeth Hand and "That Old School Tie" by Jack Womack, have aged poorly in their depictions of gender and sexuality. The anthology is rounded out by an interview with Datlow, in which she discusses the evolution of her career, her love of the grotesque, and her hunt for stories that "hit on all cylinders." This is a worthwhile investment for Datlow fans and anyone interested in charting the progress of speculative fiction.
