Short stories. Generally OK, some poor, none outstanding.
Christopher Rowe, The Force Acting on the Displaced Body
Ed Park, Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts
Shelley Jackson, Angel
John Gonzalez, Impala
Samantha Hunt, Famous Men (Three Stories)
Alex Irvine, Gus Dreams of Biting the Mail Man
Greer Gilman, A Crowd of Bone
Alan DeNiro, Fuming Woman
Maureen McHugh, Eight-Legged Story
Dave Shaw, King of Spain
Susan Mosser, Bump Ship
Vandana Singh, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet
Glen Hirshberg, Shipwreck Beach
Jeffrey Ford, The Yellow Chamber
Beth Adele Long, Destroyer
Carol Emshwiller, Gods and Three Wishes
Christopher Barzak, Dead Boy Found
Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, Insect Dreams
Richard Butner, Ash City Stomp
Karen Joy Fowler, King Rat ( )

Creating an anthology that everyone will like is almost an impossible task. I like reading short fiction so I am used to having a few bad stories in any of the anthologies that I read.

I stopped reading the book twice - after each of the first two stories - the first one seemed like a literary exercise in boredom, the second just did not work for me. Maybe some people will like them - none of them is a really bad story really - they are just not my type of stories. I came back to the book anyway and I am happy that I did.

Most of the stories after these two might be disturbing or strange but they are readable (with one exception that might not even be an exception - I never finished the longest story in this anthology - Greer Gilman's "A Crowd of Bone" - the first 5 pages almost made me stop reading the whole book again so I just skipped it - it might have been a case of a bad start but I suspect I would not have liked it anyway). All of them have one thing in common - the authors are trying to give the reader a good story and for the most part they succeed - some of the stories might be not exactly to my liking but they still are readable (people's threshold for readability varies of course) .

I am not sure which my favorite story would be though - I am split between "The Woman Who Thought She was a Planet" (Vandana Singh) and Karen Joy Fowler's "King Rat" - both stories are so different that they just cannot be compared but both of them are just beautifully done. And the fact that the editor decided to use the latter one as a closing story for the whole anthology, makes the end of the book much better than the beginning (because at the very end we have 2 more very strong stories).

So is this the perfect anthology? No, not really. Is it a good one? I would have to say yes - regardless of the few really strange choices in the book. It depends on what someone is searching but if the goal is to read a few nice genre-crossing and borderline strange stories, it is a good one. If you are searching stories that are obviously fantasy or any other defined genre, keep looking, that's not your book.

3.5 stars for the book - mainly on the strength of the later part of the book. ( )

Just got this in the mail and bumped it up near the top of the reading queue.