Best American Fantasy 2006
Written byPosted on March 27, 2007
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The entries for this year’s Best American Fantasy have been announced. To whet everybody’s appetites for this interesting and variegated collection, I’ve provided links to all of the stories that are online:
“A Hard Truth About Waste Management” by Sumanth Prabhaker
from Identity Theory
“The Stolen Father” by Eric Roe
from Redivider
“The Saffron Gatherer” by Elizabeth Hand
from Saffron & Brimstone (M Press)
“The Whipping” by Julia Elliott
from The Georgia Review
“A Better Angel” by Chris Adrian
from The New Yorker
“Draco Campestris” by Sarah Monette
from Strange Horizons
“Geese” by Daniel Coudriet
from The Mississippi Review
“The Chinese Boy” by Ann Stapleton
from Alaska Quarterly Review
“The Flying Woman” by Meghan McCarron
from Strange Horizons
“First Kisses from Beyond the Grave” by Nik Houser
from Gargoyle
“Song of the Selkie” by Gina Ochsner
from Tin House
“A Troop [sic] of Baboons” by Tyler Smith
from Pindeldyboz
“Pieces of Scheherazade” by Nicole Kornher-Stace
from Zahir
“Origin Story” by Kelly Link (excerpt)
from A Public Space
“An Experiment in Governance” by E.M. Schorb
from The Mississippi Review
“The Next Corpse Collector” by Ramola D
from Green Mountains Review
“The Village of Ardakmoktan” by Nicole Derr
from Pindeldyboz
“The Man Who Married a Tree” by Tony D’Souza
from McSweeney’s
“A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets” by Kevin Brockmeier
from Oxford American
“Pregnant” by Catherine Zeidler (excerpt)
from Hobart
“The Warehouse of Saints” by Robin Hemley
from Ninth Letter
“The Ledge” by Austin Bunn (excerpt)
from One Story
“Lazy Taekos” by Geoffrey A. Landis
from Analog
“For the Love of Paul Bunyan” by Fritz Swanson
from Pindeldyboz
“An Accounting” by Brian Evenson
from Paraspheres (Omnidawn)
“Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot” by Daniel Alarcón
from Zoetrope: All-Story
“Bit Forgive” by Maile Chapman
from A Public Space
“The End Of Narrative (1-29; Or 29-1)” by Peter LaSalle
from The Southern Review
“Kiss” by Melora Wolff
from The Southern Review
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
Who knew A Public Space was a fantasy mag? Or Oxford American, etc.
I love Maile Chapman’s story “Bit Forgive”–she’s someone whose work I’m always on the lookout for.
AW