This wonderful collection celebrates fantasy's heyday with 33 masterpieces of short fiction ranging from the 1940s to today. Contributors include L. Sprague de Camp, H.L. Gold, Manly Wade Wellman, Peter S. Beagle, James P. Blaylock, Suzy McKee, Jane Yolen, and Roger Zelazny. "This well-balanced compilation belongs in all fantasy collections".--"Library Journal".
Dozois chose 32 short stories from genre fantasy magazines, dating from 1939 to 1996, because he liked them as a reader. His taste runs from high fantasy, sword and sorcery, magic realism, and urban fantasy to comic fantasy by such well-known authors as Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Jane Yolen, Ursula K. Le Guin, Terry Bisson, and others. He includes an informative preface on the history of fantasy and a recommended reading list of contemporary authors, magazines, anthologies, and critical articles. This well-balanced compilation belongs in all fantasy collections. Copyright 1998 Library Journal Reviews
Looking back on 50 years of American fantasy writing, veteran SF editor Dozois has chosen to collect 32 splendid short stories according to one irrefutable criterion: "I liked them." In his retrospective preface, Dozois adds that he has selected only stories leading toward modern fantasy, which he feels differs from SF only in its attitude, its "emotional weather." Opening with H.L. Gold's 1939 "Trouble with Water," a quirky rendition of the Midas myth, and passing through two of Fritz Lieber's best 1950s precursors to the sub-subgenre of sword and sorcery, Dozois's choices soon exhibit his fascination with sensually charged, emotionally elegiac subcreations and with humanity facing doom unbowed. Keith Roberts's 1966 "The Signaller" delineates a church militant gone mad with power, and Poul Anderson's brilliant 1977 "Tale of Hauk" brings icy Norse sagas with volcanoes at their hearts to burning life again. Sadly, women fantasists receive scant attention from Dozois, although he does include Ursula le Guin's crystalline grief over environmental depredation in "Buffalo Gals. Won't You Come Out Tonight?" (1987), Jane Yolen's superb hymn to the huntress Diana, "The Sleep of Trees" (1980), and Judith Tarr's moving medieval otherworld of "Death and the Lady" (1992). With the best stories here, especially John Crowley's haunting 1990 "Missolonghi 1824," Dozois spreads out a tapestry of dreams, a banquet of "pain dipped in honey." (Jan.) FYI: Dozois has won seven Hugo Awards for Best Editor.
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