Fantasy and Fun

Ann VanderMeer currently serves as an acquiring editor for Tor.com and Weird Fiction Review and is the editor-in-residence for Shared Worlds. She was the editor-in-chief for Weird Tales for five years, work for which she won a Hugo Award. Fantasy stories have always been with us. They illuminate the odd and the uncanny, the wondrous and the fantastic: all the things we know are lurking just out of sight, other worlds, talking animals, fairies, goblins, demons, tricksters, and mystics. It’s a rich literary tradition that spans the globe. In The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (Vintage) Jeff VanderMeer offers both, careful scholarship and fantastic fun. The book includes classics by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Mary Shelley, and J. R. R. Tolkien; and offerings from literary giants including Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, Vladimir Nabokov, and W.E.B. Du Bois. But also treasures from Asian, Eastern European, Scandinavian, and Native American traditions. Publishers Weekly called The Big Book of Classic Fantasy  “An impressive cross-section of early fantasy in this fascinating anthology of 90 stories. […] a must-have for those interested in the roots of modern fantasy, and it gives a welcome introduction to many unexpected delights.”

Jeff VanderMeer is the New York Times bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy. His recent novel Borne has been selected for the NEA Big Reads program and was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. In The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (Vintage) Ann and Jeff VanderMeer offer both, careful scholarship and fantastic fun. The collection includes classics by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Mary Shelley, and J. R. R. Tolkien; literary giants such as Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, Vladimir Nabokov, and W.E.B. Du Bois; and treasures from Asian, Eastern European, Scandinavian, and Native American traditions. In Dead Astronauts, (MCD) VanderMeer presents a City with no name where, in the shadow of the all-powerful Company, lives human and otherwise converge in terrifying and miraculous ways.

V.V. Ganeshananthan, a fiction writer and journalist, is the author of the novel Love Marriage (Random House, 2008), which was long-listed for the Orange Prize and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. She is a graduate of Harvard College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the MA program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she was a Bollinger Fellow specializing in arts and culture journalism. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Non-Required Reading. She has served on the boards of the South Asian Journalists Association and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. In 2014, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the National Endowment for the Arts awarded her fellowships. In fall 2015, she began teaching at the University of Minnesota.

Whitney Terrell’s most recent novel, The Good Lieutenant, was selected as a best book of 2016 by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and Refinery 29. It was long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. He is also the author of The Huntsman, a New York Times notable book, and The King of Kings County. He was an embedded reporter in Iraq during 2006 and 2010 and covered the war for The Washington Post Magazine, Slate, and NPR. His nonfiction has also appeared in The New York Times, Harper's, The New Republic, Literary Hub, and other publications. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast at Literary Hub.