2010 Reading #84: Best American Fantasy
Oct. 5th, 2010 08:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snurriBooks 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.
81. The Dakota Indian Internment at Fort Snelling, 1862-1864 by Corinne L. Monjeau-Marz.
82. A Life on Paper: Selected Stories by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated by Edward Gauvin.
83. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.
84. Best American Fantasy, edited by Ann Vandermeer, Jeff Vandermeer, and Matthew Cheney. I had a hard time with this anthology; some of the stories were great, and some of them bored me, struck me as unambitious, or actively irritated me. (My reaction seems to be similar to that of Gwyneth Jones's, although the specific stories that bothered me vary from hers somewhat.) Kelly Link has a story here, and Meghan McCarron, and those are of course wonderful, but I had read them both before; all but one of the other stories were new to me. Many of them--more, probably, than in any genre "Best" I've read before--come from various literary journals. This is good in that I should read more from the literary journals than I do, but it's bad in that most of the stories from the literary journals made me less inclined to do so. Standout stories included those by Kevin Brockmeier, Daniel Alarcón, Julia Elliott, and Nicole Kornher-Stace. Only a couple of the remaining stories struck me as actively bad, but several of them struck me as playful in the wrong way--to me fantasy should be playful in the way that children are playful, and children are playful in a very serious way. Some of the selections here are playful in a more academic way, and came across as simultaneously less serious and more joyless than I prefer my fantasy--really, my fiction in general--to be. It's possible I'm just rationalizing a prejudice here, since the stories I did like seem to come mostly from the more genre-centric publications and writers. One thing that a reading experience like this does is to help me calibrate my tastes, and sometimes I'm surprised at how conventional they can be.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.
81. The Dakota Indian Internment at Fort Snelling, 1862-1864 by Corinne L. Monjeau-Marz.
82. A Life on Paper: Selected Stories by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated by Edward Gauvin.
83. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.
84. Best American Fantasy, edited by Ann Vandermeer, Jeff Vandermeer, and Matthew Cheney. I had a hard time with this anthology; some of the stories were great, and some of them bored me, struck me as unambitious, or actively irritated me. (My reaction seems to be similar to that of Gwyneth Jones's, although the specific stories that bothered me vary from hers somewhat.) Kelly Link has a story here, and Meghan McCarron, and those are of course wonderful, but I had read them both before; all but one of the other stories were new to me. Many of them--more, probably, than in any genre "Best" I've read before--come from various literary journals. This is good in that I should read more from the literary journals than I do, but it's bad in that most of the stories from the literary journals made me less inclined to do so. Standout stories included those by Kevin Brockmeier, Daniel Alarcón, Julia Elliott, and Nicole Kornher-Stace. Only a couple of the remaining stories struck me as actively bad, but several of them struck me as playful in the wrong way--to me fantasy should be playful in the way that children are playful, and children are playful in a very serious way. Some of the selections here are playful in a more academic way, and came across as simultaneously less serious and more joyless than I prefer my fantasy--really, my fiction in general--to be. It's possible I'm just rationalizing a prejudice here, since the stories I did like seem to come mostly from the more genre-centric publications and writers. One thing that a reading experience like this does is to help me calibrate my tastes, and sometimes I'm surprised at how conventional they can be.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-10-08 04:46 am (UTC)So literary-journal types don't necessarily write good fantasy stories. And you think this says more about your tastes than about their writing?
To me, it makes perfect sense that people who regularly write fantasy, and publications that regularly publish fantasy, would end up with better fantasy stories.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-10-16 04:32 pm (UTC)I guess I'm less concerned about my tastes than with the disconnect with the editors here; Ann, Jeff, and Matt are all people whose opinions I respect, even though I know I don't always agree with them. So the fact that a not-insignificant percentage of the stories they selected were ones that I bounced off of creates some cognitive dissonance for me; I end up feeling like I'm not seeing what they were aiming for, like I might be missing the point.
I think there are a lot of folks who are largely considered "literary" who may slot just as well into fantasy, at least part of the time--the magical realists, obviously, and people working in the tradition of, say, Kafka--and I like a lot of that stuff. So I do like to go beyond the usual suspects in that regard.