surreal botany review in strange horizons
A mostly positive review of A Field Guide to Surreal Botany from Richard Larson at Strange Horizons today:
If Surrealism was a revolutionary movement representative of the liberation of a previously dormant collective imagination, A Field Guide to Surreal Botany, edited by Jason Erik Lundberg and Janet Chui (who also contributed striking illustrations), a lovely little book encompassing a vast collaborative collage of imagined plant specimens, is a quiet inversion, a patient investigation of the fantastic in literature. Too much attention to the actual tenets of Surrealism as a framework for understanding A Field Guide to Surreal Botany would probably do the book a disservice, as, due to its necessary subscription to formula, it doesn't necessarily align itself with the more disorganized, chaotically free expression of "the real functioning of thought" (as Andre Breton defined the movement in his seminal Surrealist Manifesto). Surreal, in this instance, is a stand-in for unreal, a signifier of the presence of the fantastic, and the book, counting among its contributors a number of writers closely associated with the community of speculative fiction, succeeds as an investigation of the idea of fantasy and its purpose, generally, within the literary community at large.
Link to the full review here.