The latest reviews

Our newest biggest fan: "If you like literary fiction, weird fiction, or more simply, to read; then pick up this anthology." So sayeth Rick Kleffel at The Agony Column!

The Baltimore City Paper devotes some in-depth attention to Interfictions and its premise in an outstanding review by Adrienne Martini: "This idea of playing with genre conventions is interstitiality's charm and what makes it a movement for the hypertext age. We want words to do more now and for our time not to have been spent with just one idea. Make a list of what the earmarks are of any genre. Can you have something you can call science fiction if it doesn't have any notion of technology? Can you have traditional fiction without a sense that the writer's world is recognizably real? Can you label a text fantasy if it doesn't involve magic?"

Playing Around on the Borders

Alex Dally MacFarlane talks about Interfictions and Text:UR, The New Book of Masks in the same review.

It made sense to me to review these two together, considering what they have in common: they both play around with the borders between genre fiction and mainstream fiction. Interfictions does it explicitly -- the purpose of the anthology is to examine the borders, to cross them and to blur them -- whereas Text:UR just does it anyway. That said, they are very different anthologies, a reflection of the difference in taste between the editors.

Of Interfictions, she "tended to enjoy most the stories that leaned closer to the fantastical."

"A Dirge for Prester John" by Catherynne M Valente, a fictional origin for the Letter of Prester John, was probably my favourite; "A Map of the Everywhere" by Matthew Cheney I liked for its strangeness and its touching love story, "What We Know About The Lost Families of ---House" by Christopher Barzak" I liked in particular for its collective and slightly creepy narrator, "A Drop of Raspberry" by Csilla Kleinheincz" attracted me because what's not to like about a love story between a lake and a person, "Black Feather" played excellently with fairytale bits and pieces and the idea of past lives.

She concludes: "The anthologies are both good... I will happily read Interfictions 2 and Text:UR 2 if they come into being."

"Buy this book."

That's reviewer Sean Melican's prescription for Interfictions in the newest issue of Ideomancer. "Various editors attempting to collect and define slipstream, or fabulist, fiction fall into the trap of simply clothing genre fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror) with a new term, not for the sake of defining or inventing a new genre, but attempting to make genre palatable to mainstream readers, writers, and critics. But ... Interfictions is the most successful anthology thus far, both defining its terms and presenting stories that function on those terms."

"Odd, Deep, Delightful"

So says the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in an in-depth review of Interfictions this week by Michael Bishop, who writes: "Editors Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss — practiced fiction writers as well as Ph.Ds in Renaissance studies and English literature, respectively — gather here 19 profoundly strange stories. From these airborne stories stream contrails of traditional realism, philosophical fable, literary fantasy, existential horror, transmogrified myth, off-center science fiction and unabashed slapstick. . . . [Interfictions] belongs on the nightstand of anyone interested in the development of contemporary short fiction."

Kudos from Australia

The Australian SF site As If has posted a comprehensive and carefully reasoned review of Interfictions, wrapping up on this note: "The prose throughout Interfictions is faultless... The stories that I loved provided me with a sublime reading experience, and I will be listening out with great interest to hear which stories are praised by other readers and critics. So far, for me, this is most definitely the anthology of the year."

It's official: Interfictions is hip

Quoth our first official post-release review, at the Hipster Book Club: "Interfictions is a phenomenal collection, containing ghost stories, fairy tales, romances, and realistic tales, none of which are precisely what they seem. The stories are as slippery as eels, and are engrossing and provocative."