Matt Cheney has posted the table of contents for Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s Best American Fantasy: 2008 over on his blog, and it looks very cool indeed. I am incredibly delighted that two of the nineteen stories are from Eclipse One: Peter Beagle’s “The Last and Only, or Mr Moscowitz Becomes French” and Jeffrey Ford’s “The Drowned Life”. I love both stories a lot, and think Peter’s story is one of the best things he’s ever written. I’ve read a healthy chunk of the book while reading for my own year’s best, and for me it meets the gold standard – in a world where people send me free books, would I buy it? And I would. Matt also reports that the very talented Kevin Brockmeier, who wrote a novel that Kelly sent me which creeped me out so much I couldn’t finish it, is editing the 2009 volume. I’ll be fascinated to see what he comes up with next year.
Edit: Amended to correct second sentence, adding ‘is editing the 2009 volume’.
Shamefully I’ve yet to finish Eclipse One, but I have to say I couldn’t agree more about the Beagle story: it’s a
timelesstimely classic.I’m glad to hear you like it as much as I did. It’s the kind of story I’m just delighted to discover. Interestingly, I think it gets better with re-reading.
Congrats!
I just re-read Beagle’s (and Ford’s) story in your The Best Science Fiction And Fantasy of the Year Volume 2 and it really is a great piece of layered fiction. Glad to hear it’s making its way to another anthology.