I read fantasy mainly for pleasure, and that mainly escapism, but there's another layer to it, too - both to the genre and to my appreciation of it - and in her short essay 'The critics, the monsters, and the fantasists', which appears at the end of this anthology, Ursula K Le Guin nails the connection between those two facets as well as anyone ever has, elegantly and lucidly highlighting both what is unique about the genre and the absurdity of its frequent literary ghettoisation.
One of Le Guin's points is that true fantasy is not allegorical; in a typically nuanced elaboration, she also points out that fantasy and allegory can overlap, and that socially conscious readings of fantasy are not only possible but often desirable. And those notions seem to run through the stories in this excellent collection - all of them fantasies, nearly all with at least something of an allegorical flavour, and the large majority of them genuine literature on any terms. Their careful selection is evident not only in the consistent quality of the stories, but also in the way that none of them goes anywhere near the classic Tolkein-esque style or motifs, instead carving out a whole range of magics and mysteries in their own veins.
I'd read a few of these before - Patricia McKillip's "The Lady of the Skulls", which does take a familiar motif but makes something new of it, Neil Gaiman's dark, effectively revisionistic version of Snow White "Snow, Glass, Apples", T C Boyle's hilarious yet strangely affecting "We Are Norsemen" and Stephen King's "Mrs Todd's Shortcut" - and each of them is good. Steven Millhauser's "The Barnum Museum" is probably the most memorable story in the anthology; its catalogue of a museum of the fantastic brings Borges to mind, along with the idea of the wunderkammer, and also made me think of MONA (which reflects well on the museum itself). Also particularly good, all in different ways: Maureen McHugh's "Ancestor Money", Jeffrey Ford's "The Empire of Ice Cream", Kij Johnson's "26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss".
One of Le Guin's points is that true fantasy is not allegorical; in a typically nuanced elaboration, she also points out that fantasy and allegory can overlap, and that socially conscious readings of fantasy are not only possible but often desirable. And those notions seem to run through the stories in this excellent collection - all of them fantasies, nearly all with at least something of an allegorical flavour, and the large majority of them genuine literature on any terms. Their careful selection is evident not only in the consistent quality of the stories, but also in the way that none of them goes anywhere near the classic Tolkein-esque style or motifs, instead carving out a whole range of magics and mysteries in their own veins.
I'd read a few of these before - Patricia McKillip's "The Lady of the Skulls", which does take a familiar motif but makes something new of it, Neil Gaiman's dark, effectively revisionistic version of Snow White "Snow, Glass, Apples", T C Boyle's hilarious yet strangely affecting "We Are Norsemen" and Stephen King's "Mrs Todd's Shortcut" - and each of them is good. Steven Millhauser's "The Barnum Museum" is probably the most memorable story in the anthology; its catalogue of a museum of the fantastic brings Borges to mind, along with the idea of the wunderkammer, and also made me think of MONA (which reflects well on the museum itself). Also particularly good, all in different ways: Maureen McHugh's "Ancestor Money", Jeffrey Ford's "The Empire of Ice Cream", Kij Johnson's "26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss".
