The Big Book of Modern Fantasy — edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

VINTAGE BOOKS 2020

Stories by Dean Francis Alfar, Erik Amundsen, J.G. Ballard, Nathan Ballingrud, Greg Bear, Aimee Bender, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Bowes, Paul Bowles, Mikhail Bulgakov, Italo Calvino, Leonora Carrington, Angela Carter, Stepan Chapman, Fred Chappell, C.J. Cherryh, Alberto Chimal, Julio Cortázar, Samuel R. Delany, Manuela Draeger, David Drake, Rikki Ducornet, Henry Dumas, Carol Emshwiller, Musharraf Ali Farooqi, Rosario Ferré, Jeffrey Ford, Karen Joy Fowler, Sara Gallardo, Alasdair Gray, Elizabeth Hand, M. John Harrison, Zenna Henderson, Marie Hermanson, Joe Hill, Nalo Hopkinson, Rhys Hughes, Intizar Husain, Shelley Jackson, Tove Jansson, Diana Wynne Jones, Vilma Kadlečková, Bilge Karasu, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Stephen King, Marta Kisiel, Leena Krohn, R.A. Lafferty, Victor LaValle, Tanith Lee, Ursula K. Le Guin, Fritz Leiber, D.F. Lewis, Kelly Link, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Gabriel García Márquez, George R.R. Martin, Patricia McKillip, Edgar Mittelholzer, Michael Moorcock, Haruki Murakami, Pat Murphy, Vladimir Nabokov, Garth Nix, Silvina Ocampo, Ben Okri, Victor Pelevin, Rachel Pollack, Sumanth Prabhaker, Terry Pratchett, Qitongren, Maurice Richardson, Joanna Russ, Edgardo Sanabria Santaliz, Ramsey Shehadeh, Leslie Marmon Silko, Han Song, Margaret St. Clair, Avrom Sutzkever, Antonio Tabucchi, Sheree Renée Thomas, Karin Tidbeck, Tatiana Tolstaya, Amos Tutuola, Jack Vance, Satu Waltari, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Manly Wade Wellman, Jane Yolen.

When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…

Within the Pale

I find this hilarious…

“Line 17: And then the gradual; Line 29: gray
By an extraordinary coincidence (inherent perhaps in the contrapuntal nature of Shade’s art) our poet seems to name here (gradual, gray) a man…”

By extraordinary coincidence, too, I have spent years publicly on this Gestalt Real-Time Reviewing site scrying such extraordinary coincidences of literary wordplay, words by instinct or typo or phonetics or semantics or visual graphology, beyond even Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy! (I first learnt about the latter literary theory in 1967 from Anne Cluysenaar.) Call it Confirmation-Bias, if you like, but I have found it works well with literature and hyper-imaginative genre fiction. He, old Skinboat claims that Shade here with ‘gray’ and ‘gradual’ refers to (Jacob) Gradus and the story or truth regarding Zembla etc.
…or as if the Pale Fire Cantos are retrocausally affected by this subsequent Commentary and, thus, by Skinboat himself !!….. representing a general conundrum I have publicly grappled with on many occasions.
“We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from dim distant Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem.”

From my review of PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov today: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/pale-fire-vladimir-nabokov/#comment-18791

Please also see: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/the-quest-for-the-literary-gestalt-its-goal-finally-in-sight/

Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov

My review of this author’s collected Stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/10/06/collected-stories-vladimir-nabokov/

My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/

When I read this book, covfefe permitting, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…

Ultima Thule

Tyrants Destroyed

Spring in Fialta

Collected Stories – Vladimir Nabokov

When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…