Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: YA anothologies, 2005
This "category" only includes one book this year, but it seems a useful category, and it seems that in other years there have been many more. The book was the McSweeney's collection Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't as Scary, Ma bye, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creatures From the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and one Other Story We Couldn't Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out, edited by Ted Thompson with Eli Horowitz. It's a very short anthology (and arguably closer to "middle-grade" than YA), with 8 original stories (plus two reprints and a comic), about 30,000 words of new fiction. (All the stories were short stories, one a short-short.)
I reviewed this for Locus. My definite favorite stories were "Monster" by Kelly Link, a "summer camp" story about, obviously enough, rumors of a monster in the woods; and "Sunbird" by Neil Gaiman, an hommage to R. A. Lafferty, about a club of gourmets who have eaten everything but the legendary sunbird, and who finally decide to eat one -- the ending surprised and delighted me.
