Cirrus@Austlit

'Imagine an alternate universe where tinkerers and dreamers craft and re-craft a world of automatons, clockworks, calculating machines, and other marvels that never were. Visionaries Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant have taken a genre already rich, strange, and inventive and challenged fourteen masters of speculative fiction, including two graphic storytellers, to embrace its established themes and refashion them in surprising ways and settings. The result is an anthology that defies its genre even as it defines it.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A collection of weird short stories that will have you hooked from the very first line, every time.

'A boy returns to his girlfriend's grave to retrieve poems he placed in her coffin, but is she pleased to see him? Wizards build high towers and command those living below, but no one knows what their magic is good for. A grandmother keeps a village, or is it a vicious dog, in her handbag.' (From the publisher's website.)

Comprising more than forty stories and poems from almost as many contributors, the 2007 edition of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, features the strangest, the funniest, the darkest, the sharpest, and the most original in both genres. The anthology also includes summations of the field by the editors complemented by articles by Edward Bryant, Charles de Lint, and Jeff VanderMeer which highlight the best of the fantastic in media, music, and comics, as well as honourable mentions—notable works that didn’t quite make the cut, but are nonetheless worthy of attention.

The Australian contributors are Kaaron Warren, Lee Battersby, Margo Lanagan and Terry Dowling.