The Vandermeers selected "A Hard Truth About Waste Management" to open their Best American Fantasy anthology. Sumanth Prabhaker's story is localized into one individual apartment where the family decides to flush all their trash down the toilet rather than pay the city's exorbitant waste management tax.
This is the perfect story to open Best American Fantasy because "A Hard Truth About Waste Management" is not the typical fantasy story. With a talking alligator and trash piling up in a way that could only be considered Suessian, "A Hard Truth About Waste Management" would not be out of place in one of Dave Eggers' Non-Required Reading series, and overall is a solid opening to this anthology.
I'm excited to read the rest of the stories in this anthology. I suspect that these are not stories I would normally encounter, though there are names like Kelly Link, Elizabeth Hand, and Sarah Monette contained within.
"A Hard Truth About Waste Management" is available online over at Identity Theory.
It's a great anthology. I'm hoping it will cause a lot of readers to re-think and expand their definitions of fantasy fiction. I certainly encountered many writers I had previously not read. I liked the Jim Shepard story so much, I devoured his entire recent collection.
ReplyDeleteI'll chip my way through it over the next couple of weeks, but I have high hopes for it.
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