Cirrus@Austlit

'Step through a shimmering portal . . . a worn wardrobe door . . . a schism in sky . . . into a bold new age of fantasy. When worlds beyond worlds became a genre unto itself. From the swinging sixties to the strange, strange seventies, the over-the-top eighties to the gnarly nineties--and beyond, into the twenty-first century--the VanderMeers have found the stories and the writers from around the world that reinvented and revitalized the fantasy genre after World War II. The stories in this collection represent twenty-two different countries, including Russia, Argentina, Nigeria, Columbia, Pakistan, Turkey, Finland, Sweden, China, the Philippines, and the Czech Republic. Five have never before been translated into English.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

An anthology of time-travel fiction.

'A landmark, eclectic, leviathan-sized anthology of fiction's wilder, stranger, darker shores. From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these stories form The Weird and amongst its practitioners number some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature.

Exotic and esoteric, The Weird plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities; you won't find any elves or wizards here... but you will find the boldest and downright most peculiar stories from the last hundred years bound together in the biggest Weird collection ever assembled.

The Weird features an all star cast of authors, from classics to international bestsellers to Booker prize winners. Here are Ben Okri and George R.R. Martin, Angela Carter and Kelly Link, Franz Kafka and China Miéville, Clive Barker and Haruki Murakami, M.R. James and Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake and Michael Chabon, Stephen King and Daphne Du Maurier.'

[Source: Amazon]

Last Drink Bird Head is a variation on a surrealist writing game. The phrase was given to over 70 writers who were asked the question 'Who or what is Last Drink Bird Head?' The results run the gamut from the hilarious to the terrifying, with each writer bringing their signature style and voice to the enterprise in less than 500 words.