★★★★☆ The Faery Reel, edited by Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling
Batting near 1.000
The Faery Reel
Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, eds
Batting near 1.000
Let's start by listing the folks who wrote this anthology:
Editors: Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling
Contributors: Kelly Link, Emma Bull, Charles de Lint, Jeffrey Ford, Neil Gaiman, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Patricia A. McKillip, Gregory Maguire, Gregory Frost, Delia Sherman, Katherine Vaz, Tanith Lee, Steve Berman, Holly Black, Bruce Glassco, Ellen Steiber, Hiromi Goto, A.M. Dellamonica, Bill Congreve, Nan Fry.
There. I hope y'all appreciate my effort in linking all those authors. If you're a fantasy reader you will see a bunch of names you recognize, as well as some you don't. But here's the real shock: ALL the stories are good. That, like, never happens. In an anthology like this you know there are going to be good stories, and you can pretty well guess that one of them will have been written by Tanith Lee. And you also expect there are going to be a lot of contributions that you can't enjoy at all. That didn't happen. I say "contributions" because three authors (Charles deLint, Neil Gaiman, and Nan Fry) contributed poems. The other 17 wrote stories.
Each contribution is followed by a one-paragraph biography of the author, then an Author's Note that usually describes the origin of the story, in the author's imagination or in folklore. Without naming any names, I will confirm what you probably guess: most of the resumes are much shorter than Tanith Lee's. But here's the truly remarkable thing: the stories by the writers with the shortest resumes are among the best in the book. (Yes, I know some of you are saying, "Why is that remarkable? Of course there are hundreds of talented young writers out there." Yes, there are, but they aren't necessarily easy to identify. You know that a bet placed on Lee or Gaiman is pretty safe.) Datlow and Windling deserve a great deal of credit for choosing these less well-known authors and encouraging them to produce such great results.
Now, I do have to complain about the technical production. (I read the kindle edition, and don't know if the following defects appeared in other editions.) I was surprised to find that Windling's "Introduction: The Faeries" was present twice, once (without a table of contents reference) between the cover and the Preface, then again after the Preface. As far as I could tell (I did not examine the second closely), these two versions were identical. More annoying, spaces between words are frequently missing. For instance, in the Introduction there is a reference to "a book called Gnomesby the Dutch artist Wil Huygen". That of course should be "a book called Gnomes by the Dutch artist Wil Huygen". This problem occurs throughout the book. And there are extra line breaks, sometimes in the middle of a sentence.