The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror volumes gather together the best works of nonrealist literature (both stories and poems) published in the English language each year -- ranging from magical realism to surrealism, from high fantasy to horror.
The stories and poems selected annually come from a wide variety of sources: not only genre magazines and anthologies, but also mainstream anthologies, literary quarterlies, small-press publications, and foreign works in translation. We've published distinguished works by writers in the fantasy and horror fields (Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Patricia A. McKillip, John Crowley, Peter Straub, Stephen King, etc.) , writers from the literary mainstream (Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt, Louise Erdrich, Joyce Carol Oates, Steven Millhauser, etc.), magical realist writers from around the globe (Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, Tatyana Tolstaya, Rosario Ferre, Pierrette Fleutiaux, etc.), celebrated writers of children’s fiction (Peter Dickinson, Gregory Maguire, Robin McKinley, Jane Yolen, etc.), and emerging writers from all these fields.
Ellen Datlow and I co-edited The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror series for its first sixteen years, 1988 through 2004 (winning three World Fantasy Awards and the Bram Stoker Award). Ellen's job was to cover horror fiction, mine was to cover magical realism & fantasy, and we collaborated on selecting stories from the shadowlands inbetween. I stepped down after Volume 16 in order to focus on other projects, but the series itself is still going strong, with Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, publishers of Small Beer Press, taking over my job. Ellen still edits the horror half of the book; the series creator/packager is still Jim Frenkel; and the cover artist & designer is still Thomas Canty, who has been part of the series since its inception. For a complete listing of stories and poems published in Year's Best since 1988, visit The Sluice, a website for the series created by S.Y. Affolee.
"Forget the other best-story collections. Datlow and Windling’s is the one that pins everything on imagination, then throws in fine writing as well. A seriously excellent anthology." — Kirkus Review
All art by Thomas Canty.
