The Third Bear

The award-winning short fictions in this collection highlight the voice of an inventive contemporary fantasist who has been compared by critics to Borges, Nabokov, and Kafka. In addition to highlights such as "The Situation," in which a beleaguered office worker creates a child-swallowing manta ray to be used for educational purposes and "Errata," which follows an oddly familiar writer who has marshaled a penguin, a shaman, and two pearl-handled pistols with which to plot the end of the world, this volume contains two never-before-published stories. Chimerical and hypnotic, this compilation leads readers through the postmodern into what is emerging into a new literature of the imagination.

Jeff VanderMeer is a columnist, a publisher, the author of several books, including Booklife, City of Saints & Madmen, Finch, Shriek: An Afterword, and Veniss Underground. He is the editor of Fast Ships, Black Sails; The New Weird; Steampunk; and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. He is the founder and editor for Ministry of Whimsy Press and is a regular contributor to Barnes & Noble Review, the Huffington Post, the New York Times Book Review, Omnivoracious, the Washington Post Book World, and Wired. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.