2008 Books #20: Interfictions, edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss

[nayad]

I'm not going to say that I loved every story in this anthology, but I was impressed with many of them. The idea of interstitial writing is that it exists between the boundaries of genres, so that it's challenging to read in the sense of never being able to know what to expect. Because of that, some of the stories were satisfying and interesting for me in ways that I'd never experienced before. Others were hard to get through because their story elements didn't fit together well, according to my taste, or they were built with difficult structures. I'm still glad that I read all of them, though, because I like to see new approaches in writing, even when the result isn't exactly what I'd hope for. Even if a story is just plain weird as far as I'm concerned, it's still cool to see that someone came up with the idea and wrote the hell out of it. The *prose* was never a problem anywhere in the book.

I'm not going to go through and list all of the stories I liked and didn't like, but I'll mention that my two favorites were "Climbing Redemption Mountain," by Mikal Trimm, and "What We Know About the Lost Families of _______ House," by Christopher Barzak. That's as coherent as I can be at this time of night, after having gotten up at 5 a.m.

(I wrote today, but it's bedtime now. I'll do a combined progress report tomorrow.)