The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

Ann VanderMeer (Editor) and Jeff VanderMeer (Editor)

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

• ISBN10: 0525563865
• ISBN13: 9780525563860
• Publish Date: 21 July 2020
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Vintage Books
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 896
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780525563860

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

The Big Book of Modern Fantasy is a massive anthology of shorter speculative fiction and a sister volume to the Vandermeer's Big Book of Classic Fantasy. Due out 21st July 2020 from Knopf Doubleday on their Vintage imprint, it's 896 pages (for the print edition) and will be available in paperback and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

Every single story in this collection is top-shelf, there are no really weak stories. All of these have been published previously and date from 1946-2018. Many of the stories are quite difficult to find and several were new to me in any form. One reason I prefer collections and anthologies is that short fiction is really challenging. It's spare and the author doesn't have a wealth of wordage to develop characters or the plotting. Well written short fiction is a delight. I also love collections because if one story doesn't really grab me, there's another story just a few pages away. I can only recall a few times where I've read a collection (or anthology) straight through from cover to cover. This one I did. I even re-read the stories which I had read before.

The stories are very well curated in my opinion, and include titans of speculative fiction (Le Guin, Borges, Delany, and more too numerous to list) alongside authors lesser known (Zenna Henderson) or not generally associated with speculative fiction (Nabokov, Henry Dumas) but no less worthy of inclusion. Before I get the Zenna fan club after me, she's one my favorite authors and I still have my first edition (paperback) copies of The People: No Different Flesh, Pilgrimage, and The Anything Box, and I revisit them regularly. The inclusion of the titular short story, The Anything Box, fit well with the other stories in this anthology and I recommend her other work highly.

I am a fan of the Vandermeer's work as editors and writers and this is another top notch quality anthology, massive in scope and size. Five stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.