Year’s Best Year’s Best
Supernumerary Publications has announced a new anthology, The Year’s Best of the Year’s Best, which will select the very best stories published in existing Year’s Best anthologies edited by Gardner Dozois, David G Hartwell, Jonathan Strahan, Karen Haber, Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, Stephen Jones, Kelly Link, and Gavin Grant.
Series editor Travis Tea said, “For too long, fans have been expected to pay for five or six different anthologies, and that’s up to 600 pages each, just to stay up to date with the field.” The new anthology will select the very best 15-20 stories from each of the previous year’s Year’s Best anthologies.
“The other editors have already done the groundwork, so it’s a market opportunity I couldn’t resist.”
Readers may be surprised at some of the selections. It will be an editorial policy not to publish stories that appear in more than one Year’s Best no matter how good the story is. Tea explained, “These stories have already been printed over and over and there’s no reason to print them all over again just to plump up the bibliographies of Ted Chiang and Michael Swanwick.”
Authors who have had stories published in any of the last Year’s Best anthologies are invited to submit manuscripts to Travis Tea, Editor, Supernumerary Publications, PO Box 555i, Cayman Islands with an SASE and a USD$50 application fee.
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I thought this was funny when Jeff VanderMeer did it for Locus last year too (http://www.locusmag.com/2005/Features/0401_Anthologies.html).
O Mortals!
That was not Jeff VanderMeer but Ferje Vedfamner. These are two very different individuals separated by more than mere anagrammatisation. Do not quibble with the Gods! I made the creatures of the sea; I can make a word!
Mr Femdarven thought he would own that joke in perpetuity by spinning out as many meaningless variations as he could think of! But his feeble intelligence missed one! He did not recognise the Meta-Joke before his very eyes! Cower before my recursive might, Mr Evamfderen!
The Squid God has spoken!
Yes indeed. I had read Jeff’s piece in LOCUS last year, and when I thought of this particular post, I went back and checked to make sure I wasn’t copying Jeff from memory and fooling myself into thinking it was original. While Jeff made a lot of great jokes about the proliferation of Year’s Best Anthologies (my favourite was THE YEAR’S BEST EXIGUOUS POLDERS, ed. John Clute), he didn’t take this particular approach or use the same twist. Mind you, Jeff deserves a tip of the hat…now done. Ah, the joys of unfettered administrative power!
Travis Tea, by the way, is the author whose novel Atlanta Nights was…how shall I put this?… too controversial for the publisher to print. For the full story, which is quite instructive for writers considering alternative publishing houses, see the Travis Tea official website.
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