Year's Best Fantasy 3

The Barnes & Noble ReviewOut of the thousands of fantasy short stories published every year, editor extraordinaire David G. Hartwell has once again compiled his annual "best of" anthology for 2002. Longtime fans of Hartwell's Year's Best fantasy and science fiction collections will undoubtedly rank his newest collection as one of strongest fantasy anthologies they've ever read. Hartwell begins the introduction with what I consider an understatement: "It was an especially good year for fantasy short fiction in 2002, and we wish this book could have been twice as long so we could have fit in a bunch of longer stories that are just as good as the ones collected here." Included in the meaty 29-story collection are literary gems by some of the biggest names in the genre -- Ursula K. Le Guin, Charles de Lint, Tanith Lee, Gene Wolfe, Neil Gaiman, Michael Swanwick, and Nalo Hopkinson, just to name a few. From the first story, Kage Baker's dark WWII fairy tale "Her Father's Eyes," to the very last, R. Garcia y Robertson's "Death in Love," a story about the Demi-Goddess of Death falling in love with the captain of an invading armada, this collection is indeed the best of the best. Simply stated, Year's Best Fantasy 3 is a celebration of fantastic storytelling by some of the masters of the genre. Paul Goat Allen