4/27/2023 0 Comments Nytimes best books 2020The Big Book of Modern Fantasy utterly delivers on its title: It is, indeed, a big book of short stories published between 19 in which, as the VanderMeers write, "an element of the unreal permeates the real world or any story that takes place in a secondary world that is identifiably not a version of ours." Everyone from Gabriel García Marquez to Ursula K. This honking tome was compiled, like an earlier anthology, The Big Book of Science Fiction, by VanderMeer and his wife, the celebrated SFF editor and publisher Ann VanderMeer. Why it's great: Jeff VanderMeer is a renowned name in contemporary science fiction, but before the author was a sci-fi superstar, he was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a huge fan of science fiction and fantasy. The Big Book of Modern Fantasy edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer It's a story Americans, whose leaders and news media frequently disregard the difficulties of the poorest members of Latin and South American countries while scapegoating migrants for their own problems, should hear loud and clear. The book straddles the line between literary fiction and supernatural mystery, mostly successfully. There she receives a chilly welcome-and watches as the school becomes haunted by a boy with gray skin and sharpened teeth. The protagonist, Lina, returns to her hometown from an unsuccessful stint in British Academia and begins working at the Anthill, a school founded by her old friend Matty to provide for the city's poorest children. Why it's great: When's the last time you read a book set in Colombia? Was it set in Bogotá, or Cartagena? This one, instead, tells a tale of Medellín, the country's second-largest city, and specifically of its most overlooked and underfunded districts. The book is worth checking out for the story "The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines" alone. Sparks’ anger will combine with yours to become the escape from reality you need. It’s a resounding success, a real demonstration of her range as a writer, just how wild her imagination is, and it’s the perfect book to read if you’re even a little bit angry. In doing so, you’ll find her exploring the gamut of imaginative conceits that science fiction, the supernatural, and the fabulist might offer but without losing sight of the storytelling and its characters at the center of each prism-like story. In her latest and most rebellious collection, Sparks offers the full effect of what it’s like to be a woman living in modern day 2020. Her first collection, May We Shed These Human Bodies, was published back in 2012 and has since become a classic of independent literature. Why it’s great: Amber Sparks has been writing some of the weirdest, most majestic short fiction for years. Abigail is charming, gripping, and moving, in somewhat equal measure-a feat in itself. There, ostracized and miserable, her only hope is Abigail: a statue of an urn-bearing woman on the school's grounds believed to grant help to those who need it. Universally beloved in Hungary, Abigail is the suspenseful coming-of-age story of Gina, the willful daughter of a Hungarian general who is sent from her home in Budapest to a religious boarding school in the country against her wishes on the eve of Nazi invasion. There's an argument to be made that they saved the best for last, if indeed this is last. NYRB took the hint, publishing George Szirtes's 2014 translation of Iza's Ballad in 2016, Rix's translation of Katalin Street in 2017, and now, Abigail. That changed in 2015, when New York Review Books published Len Rix's 2005 translation of The Door in America, named one of The New York Times's top 10 books of the year. And yet, if you lived in the United States, you would hardly have known-her work hadn't been translated into English since 1995. Why it's great: When Magda Szabó died in 2007, Hungary lost one of its finest, most nuanced literary voices. Abigailby Magda Szabó (translated by Len Rix)
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