Best American Fantasy–Offering Review Copies
We’ve got some extra copies of Best American Fantasy 2008. If you’re a blogger or reviewer interested in reading and covering this title, send me an email at vanderworld at hotmail.com and I’ll see what I can do to hook you up. Please include your address and the media outlet/blog you represent in your initial query to save some time.
Meanwhile, SF Site has a review of BAF2 in which Paul Kincaid chokes on the word “American” and makes a pretty crappy sweatshop joke. Um, Paul–Mexico has its own language. It is called Spanish, and most of the best writers down there, well, they write in it…[point being, as per below, that it would require more resources, time, editorial assistance, etc., to be able to identify and then translate such work for inclusion].
That uses up my allotted respond-to-reviews word count for the year, so rest assured even if you loathe BAF2 when you review it, I ain’t comin’ after ya. LOL. Cheers.
May 2, 2009 at 12:59 am
….well, looks like there’s going to be one unhappy little black duck here since i’m going to be reading about all of these marvellous books THAT I WON’T BE ABLE TO GET A HOLD OF!!!!! maybe i’m a masochist since i’ll keep on coming here to see what’s goin on…..maybe i’ll hire myself out as a human ashtray while i’m at it……any takers?
peace and love
May 2, 2009 at 1:58 am
thars always this here intertubes yer on. it may be lectronic but it does deliver meat.
May 2, 2009 at 10:27 am
Huh. When did the title change, since my copy has Best American Fantasy 2? As for that review…that intro was a bit odd, even if the rest I could see his points, even if I disagreed with some of the stories disparaged (and one that was praised).
May 3, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Gee. I wonder what language Americans speak, then. Because where I grew up, most of the people were Americans and spoke more than one language, not all of them the same.
May 3, 2009 at 1:26 pm
yeah? and how many of them wrote fiction in a lingo other than their native tongue, smart guy?
larry–as reported earlier, we are unmooring baf from specific years. as for the review, my problem with kincaid is he’s poisoned the well before you get to his analysis…such as it is.
May 3, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Yeah yeah Jeff, bitch bitch bitch. Despite its minor shortcomings, what Paul Kincaid ultimately gave you was a solid, positive review of your collection, along with a great pull-quote – “There is a broadness of devices, styles and topics explored here that stands as a wonderful corrective to the narrow and repetitive tone of too many fantasy collections.” – that would grace the cover of any reprint of your book.
May 3, 2009 at 2:22 pm
The point is that they had multiple native tongues. Many people around the world grow up bilingual, even in the US. Hell, I’m an Anglo (and not a guy, thanks), and was raised speaking both Spanish and English.
I hardly see how asking thought-provoking questions — especially such basic ones — poisons the well. I’m not sure where the propaganda is. It would have served you better to have simply said that you were sticking to an old-fashioned canonical definition of ‘American’ literature, or that your inability to read other languages, or even the costs of translation played into the selection, rather than to imply that people who live in the Americas but aren’t citizens or residents of the US aren’t American.
May 3, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Medievalist–especially when I’m viewing posts on my phone, confusion may result–sorry re “guy”!! The ethnicity of contributors…well, who knows what ethnicity they are. I don’t. We just picked the stories we thought best. A translated story from a Mexican writer in a North American journal wouldn’t automatically be disqualified. But there’s no way to get a representative sample of fiction in Spanish and Portuguese in order to include Latin America in any meaningful way. Also remember that it’s the second year. Each year the guest editors will have more and more access to more and more material as the series becomes better known. If we could expand it to include LA in a systematic way,great. But staffing-wise it’s hard enough to keep up with a focus on North America. If you decided tomorrow that you wanted to edit a Best Latin American Fantasy or whatever, I’d gladly support such a venture as best I could. But given our stated brief, it is disingenuous for Kincaid to lay into the term “Best American”. As it is, we are casting a far wider net within our stated focus than any other fantasy year’s best.
May 3, 2009 at 4:31 pm
I assume then that you also object to Best American Short Stories and Best American Poetry?
But the overriding brief is needing to have focus for any anthology, and with the thousands of US/Canadian lit mags, it would be as stated impossible to cover Latin America. My inability to read in Spanish is irrelevant. The expense of translation is. Does begin to get some ideas started in my brain, though. I’d hoped to do a translated fiction series going through Ministry of Whimsy, but the economy is so bad even trad projects have trouble gaining traction. Anyway, BAF switches editors every year.
May 3, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Jeff- that makes more sense than your comment about Mexicans writing in Spanish. It’s honestly a tough call, in that the lit people traditionally define American as USian. But they are also notoriously narrow when it comes to including genre fiction in the canon. So to me it seems a perfectly natural thing for editors of a genre anthology to reject the prescriptive “American”. For similar reasons, it makes sense to deliberately seek out venues where writers of colour publish, because we still live in a world where the default is white and male.
But Kinkaid’s points as I understood them, that not everyone defines ‘American’ by US, and that fantasy draws on international literary traditions, seem to me to be valid. As we operate more and more on an international level, I don’t know that it’s a bad thing to remind international readers, for whom “American” may not be limited to the US, that what they are getting is just that. Nor is it a bad thing to remind people that we can’t just assume the two are the same. Part of reviewing is telling the prospective readers what is in a book — and what isn’t. So it was useful to me to know that the stories came from a broader selection of original publications than is the norm. It was also useful to know that the collection tended more towards the fantastic than to straight fantasy. I dunno — it just seemed to me that your reaction was unnecessarily defensive. When there are plenty of good reasons for putting together the book you did — including, “This is the book we wanted,” it’s confusing to read a comment that suggests that Mexicans (for example) aren’t really Americans because they don’t write in English.
May 3, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Jeff, you wrote, “especially when I’m viewing posts on my phone, confusion may result” — it is good of you to admit this. It’s not simply a matter that confusion may result, it *does* result, repeatedly, in everything we read, and not just on phones but on screens and in papers and in printed books. We all misread, not just occasionally but constantly — it’s built into the act of reading itself, as you well know. Some of the most brilliant, closest readers can be among the worst offenders, because their own confidence in the accuracy and incisiveness of their reading skills can cause them to fail to recognize a significant proportion of their own misreadings. You’ve done it, I’ve done it, and every writer and editor we know has done it. That said, I believe that you misread the very lines from Paul Kincaid’s review that you so strenuously object to — and that your objection is largely based on your misreading, and not on an interpretively accurate reading, of what he actually wrote. I’m not defending what he wrote, nor do I consider it to be amongst his finer moments as a reviewer or critic, but I do think you misread it and misheard its tone, and that your initial posted comments on it are about a text that doesn’t actually exist. Read it again, please, if you would, and listen for another way to hear and interpret what he wrote.
May 3, 2009 at 6:48 pm
Med–I appreciate the comment but I never said that Mexicans were not Americans. I simply pointed out that just as most Czechs write fiction in Czechoslovakian, most Mexican writers, to the best of my knowledge, from looking at anthos and translations, write in Spanish. I don’t know that it’s the most original comment ever, but Kincaid made the sweatshop comment, I did not.
Your point about expanding the focus…again, resources, time, money, etc. It’s simply not possible. Nor is it necessarily desirable in terms of creating a diverse yet focused book. Now, casting as wide a net as possible in terms of North American publications, as you suggest, is of course part of our brief. And since the guest editor changes every year, the tastes and focus will change every year–this is the strength of having revolving editors. That said, this discussion will of course inform decisions made moving forward.
Ron–that’s a good point, and I admit I could’ve been less sarcastic in making my point. The problem is: our brief is clear, and Kincaid could have given the information Medievalist wanted in one or two sentences simply by quoting from our mission statement. Instead, he deliberately chooses to pretend to not know what our brief is. Or, he’s not a good enough reviewer to do his research. This kind of meandering is sloppy, and it’s not a review of the anthology–it’s a backhanded and dishonest critique of editorial intent. Had he spent those words actually engaging the stories and providing more analysis, and then *hated every story in the anthology*, I would not have included that comment in my post. He has every right to review the stories and find them wanting. He doesn’t have the right to pretend he doesn’t know our objectives when they are clearly stated. Or, even if he does, I think I have the right to point this out, whether communicated well or poorly. Does that make sense?
May 3, 2009 at 7:07 pm
I didn’t say that’s what you meant. I said that it read that way in context.
May 3, 2009 at 7:08 pm
That’s a fine distinction, ADM.
May 3, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Anyway, I’m now actually glad I included the comment about the review, since this discussion has got me thinking quite seriously about some possibilities.
May 6, 2009 at 12:53 pm
It’s an important distinction, though. Tone is hard on the internet. And while I’m fine with “but the writer didn’t mean that,” as a rule, I think that that doesn’t mean that readers can’t possibly have read it a different way!
May 6, 2009 at 3:27 pm
I admit I could’ve been less sarcastic in making my point
This is worth keeping in mind, especially for someone who is so sensitive about perceived slights from others.
May 6, 2009 at 4:13 pm
Frank, that’s a bullshit attempt to reframe a general comment about dishonesty in a review as something personal. Both of my co-editors on BAF agreed with what I pointed out. And as I observed I am not talking about Paul’s opinion of the stories. But thanks.