Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology

Themed anthologies are usually put together by people who pay pennies and earn nickels -- if they're lucky. Under such conditions, it's pretty unusual that every story is worth reading. This book is one of those rare exceptions. There are enough reliable names here -- M. Rickert, Jeffrey Ford, Ted Chiang, Kelly Link -- that anyone who pays attention to speculative fiction will have already identified this book as worth reading. But for those of you who are poking your heads in from the world of mainstream literature, please come in! This book is a warm and welcoming place for you pale things -- strange and thrilling, but not formulaically so. Really, please come in. I'm serious.

Feeling Very Strange was one of the most celebrated anthologies of last year. It took me a while to get around to reading it, partly because I had read most of the stories already. But I finally did read it. I reread the stories I had already read, and was darned happy to do so. It really is an outstanding book. It includes some surprising and very effective pieces from outside the core SF/Fantasy genre -- notably Michael Chabon's "The God of Dark Laughter" and George Saunders's "Sea Oak". It includes some stories from within the genre that I had liked a lot (and praised highly in public) but that I didn't really see as slipstream -- though I see the editors' point in including them now I think -- stuff like Benjamin Rosenbaum's "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Airplanes', by Benjamin Rosenbaum", and Theodora Goss's "The Rose in Twelve Petals", and Ted Chiang's "Hell is the Absence of God". It includes Kelly Link's magnificent "The Specialist's Hat", easily one of the spookiest stories I have ever read. It includes Howard Waldrop's Alternate History of an ascendant Africa, "The Lions are Asleep This Night" -- another story I wouldn't have at first blush called slipstream (and it does seem that the editors consider certain types of AH slipstream (the Rosenbaum story being another example), but that works that way, and reads a bit differently in that context.) There is also a fine new story by M. Rickert, "You Have Never Been Here", and good stories by Carol Emshwiller, Jonathan Lethem, Aimee Bender, Bruce Sterling, Jeff VanderMeer, Karen Joy Fowler, and Jeffrey Ford. Highly recommended.

If you like 'gothic' this is the book for you - an excellent book

Advanced review galleys are not typically featured - we usually only review from finished books - but FEELING VERY STRANGE: THE SLIPSTREAM ANTHOLOGY is something unusual to watch for: a collection which helps define and identify the genre of fiction known as 'slipstream'. This category has long defied easy definition: blend literary avant garde elements with science and you begin to realize its boundaries. It embraces cognitive dissonance, ambiguity, and visionary oddities and the short stories by Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Bruce Sterling and others provide diverse satisfying examples of how this is accomplished. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch